The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (46 page)

The wind tugs a lock of the young man’s hair into his face; he makes
no move to push it back, thinking it a romantic image of melancholy. Instead,
he turns to the tired house: blistered paint, curled shingles, the yard
hard-packed dirt incapable of supporting anything but weeds. It is out of place
and miserable. “I don’t know where it went to or when it disappeared, but I
know it wasn’t always like this. We gotta leave while we still can.”

She does not respond, but only stares at him from under the shade of
her hand.

“Will you come with me?” he asks.

She is silent for a moment. Then: “Of course. Where will we go?”

Smiling, he moves towards her, hands thrust into the pockets of his
jeans; he is young; graceful articulation escapes him. “Anywhere we want. It’s
all out there; it’s just waiting for us.”

The view centers and pulls back, widening to the vast horizon.
Dissolve.

Open on a movie rental store late at night. Three people remain amidst
the empty aisles of DVD boxes and dark Berber carpeting: a young woman behind
the counter and two customers.

“Both movies are due back Thursday,” the cashier says
automatically.

The first customer takes his DVDs—
Annie Hall
and
Sex and
Lucia
—and heads quickly towards the door. The young woman shrugs indifferently.
The last customer is a young man carrying half a dozen DVDs. He steps forward
and places the stack down on the counter then reaches for his wallet. The
cashier begins scanning the movies into the register. She knows him the way all
cashiers know all regular customers, a kind of anonymous familiarity, an
acquaintance who is known and not known both at once, paradoxical and
symptomatic of the times.

“Big movie fan?” she remarks.

“Sorta,” he says, fishing out his rental card and a
twenty. “I just lost my job.”

The cashier looks up. “For real?”

He nods, his smile a little more forced than a moment before; the news
is still new to him, the reaction it engenders still unaccustomed.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Both are surprised to discover that she is sincere.

“I’m not,” he replies. “I don’t think that job was really any good for
me anyway. I just kind of fell into it, ya know. After a while, I convinced
myself it was okay, that it was where I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. But
it wasn’t.”

The cashier finishes ringing up his movies, the transaction taking
place beneath the conversation like the world outside the window, separated by
a pane of glass, inconsequential. “Yeah. And what do you want to do?”

“I want to be a writer,” he answers.

She nods. “Newspapers or novels?”

The customer pauses, not so much to consider his answer as the
interest she takes in asking the question. “Novels.”

“Novels are good,” she says. “Why didn’t you do that before? Before
the other job, I mean.”

“I wasn’t sure I was good enough. And I guess I never thought it was
very realistic.”

“And now?” she asks.

“I think what’s realistic is a lot broader than I originally gave it
credit for.”

She nods. “Well, those are all due back Thursday. I guess you know the
drill.”

“Yeah. Hey, would you like to get a cup of coffee or something?”

She glances at the clock on the wall, frowning. “I’m stuck here until midnight.”

“What about after? Is midnight too late for a cup of coffee?”

She smiles—it is a smile he has always liked, the one he instantly fell
in love with, the one that keeps him coming back to this same store, time after
time.

“I don’t think it’s ever too late for coffee.”

“My name’s Jack. I guess you already knew that … from my account.”

The cashier nods, laughing gently as he reaches over to shake her
hand.

“Hi Jack,” she says. “I’m Ellen.”

He gathers his movies and heads for the door. “How about I stop back
at midnight. We’ll go somewhere and get coffee.” He pauses at the door. “You
know, for three weeks I’ve wanted to ask you out, but I never did.”

“No?” she says. “Why not?”

“A customer hitting on a cashier; I guess I didn’t think it was
realistic. Now I’m kinda glad I lost my job.”

He leaves and the cashier watches him go, smiling.

Fade to black.

It is late morning outside of a truck stop along the highway in the
desert southwest. A semi pulls away in a cloud of dust. The glare from the sun
burns out the colors of the world inside the diner. The breakfast rush is over;
the diner’s patrons have moved on. Points west. Points east. All points but
here. The only waitress on duty leans her elbows on the counter and stares out
the front windows at the empty desert outside, the packed dirt of the lot, the
gray slice of asphalt, the distant mountains. She wonders if there is something
more.

A bell over the door rings. The young waitress looks up and sighs—she
asked the owner to get rid of the bell, but he refused, saying it was expected
for a truck stop to have a bell; a bell over the door and cute waitresses in short
skirts. God forbid anything in this world should be unexpected, unusual,
anything but completely and utterly typical. Every Wednesday after closing, the
owner locks the door to the office under the pretext of doing the books, and
spends the evening masturbating to magazines of fat women. He is always in a
good mood on Wednesdays. Typical.

A long-haired young man stands in the doorway—just passing through;
locals don’t wear their hair long after they turn eighteen unless they’re from
the res. He’s dressed in denim, dusty from the road, but his smile is pleasant.
He has nice eyes.

“Morning. What can I get ya?” the waitress asks.

The man sits down at the counter. “Coffee?”

“Decaf or regular?”

“Not much point in decaf,” he says lightly.
“Regular, please.”

Smiling, the waitress turns to get the coffeepot. The man’s eyes
travel her up and down quickly—but not too quickly. When she turns back around,
he makes it a point to be looking at the menu board posted on the wall behind
the counter. She isn’t fooled.

“Where ya headed?” she asks. When you’re paid on tips, a certain
amount of small talk helps pay the bills.

“West.”

“What’s west?” she asks.

“Something other than what I left behind.”

The waitress nods. “I was headed west about four months ago. I got
about this far. I was broke, my feet were sore, and when I thumbed for rides,
both the truckers and the cops assumed I was a hooker. I’ve been waiting tables
here ever since.”

“What were you looking for out west?”

“Same as you, I guess; anything but what I left
behind.”

The man smiles. “There hasn’t been gold in California for a century,
but somehow everyone goes there looking for their dreams.”

“The land of second chances,” she says, intending it as an offhand
remark.

The man looks up from his coffee. “Exactly. It’s like if you can put
an entire continent between yourself and what was before, that previous life
can’t ever drag you back. You can start over. Do things the way you should have
the first time.”

The scene pulls back, the two people left of frame, their conversation
going unheard as Sheryl Crowe’s “Everyday Is a Winding Road” plays over the scene.
In the rest of the frame, time passes rapidly while they talk, the hands on the
clock spinning, shadows drawing across the diner’s floor to hide along walls.
No customers enter.

“You know, if you’re still looking to head west, you’re welcome to
join me,” he says. “I can’t promise where we’ll end up, but I can certainly
offer you a lift if you’re interested.”

The waitress looks around at the empty diner: the bell over the door,
the tables she has cleaned so many times that counting has become meaningless.
She looks back over her shoulder, seemingly peering through the walls at the
dingy kitchen, grill thick with grease, the owner’s back office with his
fat-fetish magazines, hidden but not as well as he thinks. She turns back to
him.

“When can we leave?”

The man drops three dollars on the counter; too much for a cup of coffee,
but a bargain for a fellow dreamer. The waitress throws her apron in the
garbage, turns the sign on the door to read closed, and erases the daily
specials board, replacing the soup of the day with GOODBYE. They exit together.

In the lot, a weather-beaten red pickup, its backend replaced with the
living legs and tail of a red dragon, scales the same faded red as the rest of
the truck. This does not seem unusual to either of them. The view pulls back
and up as they climb in and drive away. The truck disappears down the road.

Fade to black.

*     *     *

Scenes ran one into the next, some original, others rehashed moments from
classic movies, the roles recast; Ellen didn’t need to hear the names to
recognize the players. Jack in a white suit leaning against a bar in Morocco, herself in an evening gown, hair stiff, face made-up.
Of all the gin joints in
all the worlds … We’ll always have pancakes.
Seated across a desk from each
other, shadows from the window blinds crossing her face, Jack’s fedora tipped
down a little too far.

Some she could not immediately place, the characters too long ago, too
young to recognize; an imagined past of their imagined youth, projected images
of a projected life that neither one lived. The segments ran on and on, no
titles or ends, just moments like random thoughts, the flow of one long,
strange trip: innocence and romance, ulcerated tales of passion and longing,
carefree and uninhibited.

Ellen drifted in and out, time meaningless as movie clips ran end to end
into sojourns upon the dreamscape. Which was which, she could no longer tell.

“What does all this mean?” she whispered.

Jack leaned an ear to her, his eyes on the screen. “What do you mean?”

“Is this supposed to be us? Is this how you imagine us?”

He turned to her in the dark. “This was the only movie I could find. I’ve
never even been in here before today.”

“But you created all this somehow.”

“The Nexus picks up on thoughts and emotions, both idle and directed,” he
said, shaking his head. “I think what we’re seeing is more like daydreams, mine
… maybe yours.”

“But I can’t control the Nexus, Jack.”

“No, but you can influence it. From the moment you first appeared on the
back porch of the saloon, this place has never been the same. You may not
control it the way I do, but you affect it.”

“So this—” she gestured at the celluloid reality “—is mine?”

“Try not to draw too many conclusions. It’s just random thoughts and
notions; creativity from chaos. When everything becomes a means to an end, the
world is bled of its wonder. What remains is a husk, just translucent bones,
death.”

“But is this real?” she asked.

Jack smiled. “It’s just a movie.”

Time in dreams is mercurial and
elusive, inconsistent, at once elongated ribbons of forever, at once fleeting
as raindrops. That morning, Gusman Kreiger came to the Edge of Madness Café,
falling out of the sky from over a thousand feet up to crash upon the pavement
with all the grace of a kite on a windless day
.

For those
who care, it was a Tuesday.

Anywhere but the Edge of Madness, anywhere more than a
stone’s throw from the Nexus, the crossroads of all creation, and the Cast Out
who once called himself Jesus Christ in a timeline very different from anything
Jack and Ellen might remember, would have died instantly, pulverized upon
impact.

But this was not any of those worlds; not any of those times;
not any of those realities
. Gusman Kreiger suffered no more damage than
a scrap of windblown paper suffers for being flung to the sidewalk by an errant
wind.

That’s not to say it didn’t hurt.

Splayed out before the immense, empty silence surrounding
him, he lay in the street for what felt like an eternity, seeing nothing but
the black-tarred road, feeling only the course stone against his face and
hands, its solidity pressing painfully against aching bones. The smell of
creosote was almost enough to mask the coppery taste of blood.

Almost.

The taste of blood means you’re hurt. And if you have
flesh to be hurt then you have made it. You are not in the alleyway behind
Ellen Monroe’s apartment else you would be dead, and you are not dead; ghosts
do not bleed and there is no pain beyond the veil no matter what the Christian
oligarchs preach. You followed her—sweet little Ellen Monroe—straight on
through to the other side, which can only mean …

“I’m back.”

The words rang empty in the air as he raised his head, taking
in the world he knew like his own hand. Not the reality he knew, but very, very
close, the differences subtle and easy to see through. A long stretch of
asphalt in a place with no roads, and beyond, an infinite bone-white desert for
as far as the eye could see—his home no more. A garage, the Last Stop, Anubis
waiting with scales raised in judgment, prepared to weigh the value of the
dead. A diner, the Edge of Madness Café, dark but for a single neon sign: HOT
COFFEE ALWAYS. No one was inside. Pounded into the roadside, a rusted steel
mailbox on a weathered post: Mercy Street. Further down, road signs directed
the lost.

For who but the lost would
ever
find themselves here?

But those here were seldom truly lost, seldom truly looking
for anyplace else. The Edge of Madness Café—more specifically the Nexus from
which it created itself—was its own destination, an end unto itself. He had
never been more lost than when he wished to be away from this place, never more
found than when he discovered a way back. This was where he was meant to be,
wanted to be; the only place he truly belonged.

“I am home,” Kreiger whispered.

The Wasteland did not answer, did not
care.

He looked down and saw blood on his
elbows and palms. He could feel the raw scrapes bleeding on his chin, the warm
ooze of blood below his nose. One hand still held the staff, once again the
lightning rod steeple that adorned the uppermost rooftop of the Sanity’s Edge
Saloon before he’d stolen it, before Jack blew the place to smithereens.

So much of everything was before.

An android emerged from the garage,
squat and powerful, features rendered by morning twilight into flat metal and
dark glass. It stepped into the road to face him, one hand extended, palm up,
metal fingers curled into lethal claws, a gesture of challenge. It carried a
pry bar in its other hand, the scored tip hovering over the pavement, the steel
thick enough to crush something a dozen times stronger than a mere human skull.

“And this is where it ends,” Kreiger
murmured.

He recognized the Guardian instantly;
a master of lies and illusions, appearances did not fool the Cast Out. His
fingers tightened upon the lightning rod, little more than reflex. He felt the
absence of power in the metal, the staff useless, fit only to serve as a TV
aerial, or a tomato stake in some alleyway vegetable garden. No match for a
Guardian whose purpose for existence was the protection of the Caretaker, a
duty it would execute with mechanical indifference and bestial cruelty.

“Frankly,” the Cast Out murmured, “I
liked you better before.”

How much of the old Guardian was
resurrected in this thing? That one hated him as it hated no other. It would
keep him out: away from the Nexus, from the Caretaker, from everything but
exile in the endless expanse of sand, emptiness his only reward for once having
reached beyond his station. He was a Cast Out, now and forever. Mage. Messiah.
Madman. All of that was gone, lost to the realm of before. He was once again a
pariah in the world of madmen and dreamers, fit only to wander the desert,
sightless, burning beneath the relentless eye of the sun, the dust beneath his
feet his only meal until the end of days.

“It’s all right, Hammerlock.”

The soft
voice from inside the garage made Kreiger’s heart turn cold, his guts become
water. He knew the voice even before the speaker stepped from the shadows,
hands in his pockets, head tipped to one side as he regarded Kreiger evenly.
Dressed only in his jeans, hair uncombed, bare feet walking gingerly on the
cold ground, he looked as if he had just woken up.

It was
not at all how Gusman Kreiger expected to meet the Caretaker again. For a
moment, he was at a loss for words.

“I was beginning to wonder when you
would get here,” Jack said. He crossed the narrow distance and crouched down
before the Cast Out, looking him in the eye. Hammerlock followed a pace behind,
the pry bar poised upon its metal shoulder. “How was your trip?” he asked.

Kreiger weighed his response
carefully, unsure the depth of Jack’s insanity. “They bumped me to coach.”

“The flight was probably overbooked,”
Jack answered back quietly.

“I expect it was more a scheduling
conflict. But I made it; that’s all that matters.”

“Yes, it is.” Jack glanced at the
dead metal clutched tight in Kreiger’s fist, its surface no longer disguised by
the other world, the normal world. It was again ornately carved iron,
copper-inlaid runes, a sphere of blue crystal caught within its length. “I see
you kept that with you. It’s worthless now, you know?”

“I expected as much.”

Jack nodded thoughtfully. “Does it
make you feel better to hold onto it?”

“Yes.”

“Keep it then. My rod and my staff,
they comfort you.”

Kreiger felt himself shrink from the
Caretaker, retreating from his madness, tightening like a coil. The Caretaker
was looking at him, the hint of a smile on his lips, an unusual glint reflected
in his eyes. It was the look of someone who understands madness, who has walked
the fine line between sanity and unreality, and is walking it still. Jack had
achieved his control; now all of the madness, all of the chaos that was
channeling through him, was being directed, manipulated, shaped. He was a
traveler in a ghost world of actual and possible where neither could be
distinguished from the other. He was the Caretaker.

He was also very,
very
dangerous; so much more so than Kreiger ever imagined. The Cast Out abandoned
any hope of regaining the Nexus, and instead turned his attention to surviving
the coming moments. The Guardian shifted closer, its mannerism more in
character with an animal, restless and eager to slip the leash.

“I suggest you stay clear of
Hammerlock for a while,” Jack advised. “He came from those first days after I
destroyed the Saloon and the Cast Outs, after I banished you to that same world
I sent Ellen to for her protection. I appreciate you looking after her, by the
way. It’s the only reason I allowed you to come back.” Then Jack paused,
waiting for the challenge, waiting on some useless remark of bravado to
contradict him and claim that the Cast Out’s return was not the Caretaker’s
decision. But Kreiger kept silent, refusing the bait, and finally, Jack let it
pass. “The point is Hammerlock comes from a time when I still believed the
dregs might return; that there might be other Cast Outs I needed to protect
myself against. I’m over that now, but it doesn’t change what he is. I can
control him, but I can’t necessarily control myself.”

“Do you understand the contradiction
of what you are saying?” Kreiger asked.

“I do, in fact. Do you?”

The Cast Out narrowed his eyes, but
reluctantly nodded. “I’ll stay clear of the Guardian.”

“Do that. You’ll be safe out in the
boneyard. Don’t try going into the café or the garage. Not just yet. Give me no
reason to distrust you, and the Café won’t accidentally kill you. I’m warning
you as a courtesy, and because I enjoy the tranquility of this place; I don’t
want to see it end just because I allowed you to come here. Don’t try to take
the focal lens; you won’t succeed. Don’t try to enter the buildings. Like
Hammerlock, they were created from a time when I still distrusted the
Wasteland. The Café will lash out against you, and there’s no magic rabbit hole
to tumble down this time. Algernon was supposed to be my teacher, but you
killed him. That was probably your biggest mistake. Algernon would have passed
on everything to me including his limitations. But you eliminated him first. So
all I had to learn from was you. Even that might have left me vulnerable, but I
learned more. I learned what Algernon and all the others before him never even
imagined. I discovered what you only ever suspected. For that, I expect I owe
you a certain debt of gratitude. You’re still alive; we’re even.”

Ellen emerged from the garage wearing
a long T-shirt, eyes half-closed with sleep; she was not a morning person, he
knew. Squinting blearily at Jack, she asked, “Who are you talking to?”

Then she saw past Jack, past
Hammerlock, to the Cast Out on hands and knees in the street; a groveling
beggar; a crouching spider. Her eyes widened, and she stormed back into the
garage.

The Caretaker cursed under his breath
and moved to follow, leaving Hammerlock to watch him, the Guardian’s metal
fingers tightening upon the pry bar, claws carving small dents into the
tempered steel.

*     *     *

Jack stopped suddenly as Ellen
reemerged carrying the long sword from his workbench, the pommel still
unfinished. Hilt notwithstanding, the blade was perfect, hammered and honed to
a razor’s edge. No doubt she had found it amidst the clutter, a detail lost but
not forgotten. Gone was the blur of sleep, her eyes alert, her attention a
scalpel, her nerves a sparking wire. Her focus drew down on the crippled
sorcerer, looking past Jack and Hammerlock as if neither existed. Sword raised,
she started towards him.

She would not forget. And she would
never
forgive.

“Ellen, wait,” Jack said, stepping in
her way, wondering why things never seemed to work out the way he planned.

“What’s he doing here, Jack?” she
demanded, voice like December shadows.

Jack sensed the rage behind her
disconnected tone; nothing would prevent her from carrying out what needed to
be done. It was the same way she killed Lenny, stabbing him in the throat with
a sharpened screwdriver before he could assault her. No thought or hesitation,
just action born of necessity.

But he could not allow her to kill
the Cast Out. Regardless of how he felt, this was not the way to end paradise.
Not again. “He was trapped in the other world with you,” he explained quietly.
“He fell through the hole you created when you came here in the dream flyer.”

“He tried to kill you, Jack,” Ellen
said, undeterred. “He tried to kill me.”

On hands and knees, Kreiger slithered
back like an insect caught in the light, staff scraping uselessly against the
asphalt. Even on the doorstep of Elysium, mercy is a boon not universally
granted.

“I know,” Jack said, holding his
ground, forcing Ellen to stop before she ran into him. He hoped to slow her
down, cause her resolve to waver, fracture the wall that she used to separate
away her conscience and make the task of ending Kreiger’s life more difficult.
“I can’t let you do this, though.”

“He killed Nail!” she screamed.

“I know,” Jack said softly. “I know
everything he did; everything he’s ever done. I’m not asking you to forgive
him. I’m not even asking you to accept him. But don’t kill him. Not for me or
for him, but for you. Leave that behind. He’ll stay in the junkyard. Hammerlock
will watch him. He can’t hurt anyone anymore, I promise you.”

She stared angrily, tears forming in
her eyes. “I know you believe that Jack, but you’re wrong. Some things don’t
change just because you want them to.” She turned, the sword dropping to the
pavement with an awkward clang, and walked away. “I don’t know why you let him
come here. You’ve ruined everything.”

Jack watched her go then retrieved
the fallen sword, bringing the tip level with Kreiger’s forehead. The
unfinished handle was uncomfortable in his grip, the sword heavier than it
appeared. But it could still do what needed to be done.
It could be so easy.
No one would ever know. And the world would never have to change.