The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (29 page)

“It’s nothing,” he lied, and quickly
raised the bottle to his lips to cover it. The beer tasted good; unbelievably
so. But not good enough to hide his discomfort at being so easily read.
“Really, it’s nothing.”

She shrugged, and he knew she didn’t
believe him, which was doubly frustrating.

“I’m surprised you’re still awake,”
he said, hoping to redirect the conversation. “I would have thought that
Lindsay would have worn you out, too.”

“I don’t usually sleep at night,” she
said. “Dregs hunt under cover of darkness.”

“I think you’ll be safe here.”

She looked over at him, and he saw
the shadows rippling across her face from the flickering candy machine, the
mottled camouflage of a tiger hidden in the tall grass. “Habits are a hard
thing to break.”

If he didn’t know better, he would
have sworn that it was a form of apology. In the main room, the song ended and,
after a short pause, started back up again. He looked over his shoulder at the
orange and green glow of the Wurlitzer, a corner visible from where he sat.
Bubbles floated up through tubes in its frame. “Like this song?” he asked.

“Before today, I had never actually
heard music. I like it.”

How much of his world he had taken
for granted, small things dismissed as inconsequential, distractions. But it
was different here. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon existed in a perfect absence of
clutter and trivialities. No calls to make, no taxes to file, no retirement to
provide for, or sugar substitutes to worry about, or radio promotions to call
in on. Nothing. And outside of the Saloon, the word
nothing
gained an
even purer definition. No music. Nothing to read. Nowhere to go or be. Nothing
to look at but the endless white sand and the endless blue sky.

Alex shook his head. “How is it that
you didn’t go mad out there after all this time?”

“What makes you think I didn’t?”

He looked over at her, her face a
secret of shadows. The plum color was gone from the sky, only blackness left
behind with faint touches of Wurlitzer orange and electric green making
Oversight’s features unreadable. He couldn’t tell if she was teasing or not.

The song ended then started over
again.
How many times had she set this same song to repeat?
he wondered.

“It eventually happens to everyone who spends too much time inside of
their own mind,” she remarked. “The only question is whether you can control
your own madness, or whether it will control you.”

He nodded absently, sipping at his
beer though he wasn’t really thirsty. Just an excuse not to look at her
expression, afraid of what he would find there.

For a few minutes, neither of them
said anything. The song ended then started up again. To Alex, it seemed like he
was stuck in some kind of loop, something from an old episode of
The Twilight
Zone
or
Star Trek
, events folding back upon themselves, those inside
doomed to repeat their activities forever, eternity spent trapped in the cycle
of a single, unchanging moment.

“If this was your last day to live,
what would you do?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“One of us won’t be leaving here. You
understand that. So, if this was your last day to live, what would you do?”

A typical question for a late night
bull session: if money was no object, what would you do? If you had one day to
live, how would you spend it? Answers were predictable: sex with a supermodel,
a day of gross opulence, vengeance on anyone who ever wronged you. Sometimes,
someone would actually give an answer that was elaborate and detailed, as
though the person had been working upon it all of his life, polishing it the
way an oyster polishes a pearl until the moment it is revealed, a thing of true
brilliance and beauty. But this wasn’t a game. There was nothing hypothetical
about her question.
One of us won’t get out of here. One of us will stay
trapped here forever, and that forever will be brutally short because “here”
does not forgive. This is not a game.

“I … I don’t know.”

He felt her hand cover his in the
darkness, her skin warm, smooth. “No?”

He shook his head. “No. I never
really thought about it. It wasn’t really a question that had any meaning
before.” He tried not to look at her directly, afraid he might reveal the
burning he felt simply at the touch of her hand.

“It always has meaning. Every second
of every minute of every day of your life is just a postponement of the end.
There’s no guarantee that the sun will rise, or that you will see it. You could
live another eighty years, or die in eighty seconds, so you have to live every
moment as if it was the moment before the end.”

“What would you do?” he asked
angrily. When you could throw a stone off the edge of madness, you should be
beyond the point of recrimination for failing to take your future seriously.

“Experience everything.”

She said it with such complete
seriousness that he nearly laughed. Here he thought she expected some elaborate
plan: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or enlightenment with the Dalai Lama. Instead,
her answer amounted to sex with a super model, or performing on Broadway. Maybe
even less defined.

But the sincerity in her stare killed
his humor. Her answer was neither jest nor exaggeration.

She leaned forward, one hand still
covering his, and set her beer on the floor beside the bench. Then she placed
her hand on the armrest he was leaning back against, trapping him inside of her
embrace. She was so close that he could smell her, the intoxicating aroma that
was sweet and spicy and indefinable and arousing—
oh yes, it was definitely
that! Above and beyond everything else, it was definitely that
. “You can’t
take anything with you but your memories,” she insisted softly. “So you have to
do everything, or else it’s lost.”

Alex felt his heart slamming in his
chest, blood rushing hotly through his veins. She took his hand, guiding it
slowly to her bare stomach and holding it there, her skin hot beneath his
fingers. Her face dipped suddenly towards his ear, and she whispered, “What
would you do if it was your last day, Alex?”

He swallowed, his throat suddenly
very dry. Her hair smelled sweet, the ends brushing lightly against his neck.
He tried to put his own beer down on the floor near hers, misjudged the
distance, and tipped the bottle over. It rolled haltingly across the smooth,
lacquered planks, half-full of beer that spilled out along the way as it
disappeared under the bench and was forgotten. The song played on in the main
room in endless repetition. And more distantly, he thought he heard the nervous
clatter of typewriter keys clicking away furiously in the night.

“What would you do?” she repeated, a
soft cooing sound in his ear that she kissed unexpectedly. It was a gentle
kiss, warm and passionate, soft lips lingering upon his earlobe and nearly
driving him over the edge. Her hand guided his palm slowly up her middle until
his fingers were laid against the swell of her breast.

It was fear more than nobility that
restrained him. “Oversight … there’s something you should—”

But she shushed him gently. “It
doesn’t matter, Alex. All that ever mattered is here and now. There isn’t
anything you can do about anything else.” Her guiding hand splayed his fingers
across one breast, nipple hardening beneath his touch. Her other hand unzipped
the jacket, the sound exaggerated in the emptiness. She leaned over him,
exposed in the flickering glow of the maniacal machine, doe-eyed and flushed,
lips eager, willing.

But still the fear. It wasn’t passion
that made him breathe in short, useless gasps, but an overriding sense of panic
that reared up in the back of his mind, screaming. “The thing is, I’ve never… I
mean I’ve never done…”

“Pretend this is our last day,” she
whispered, and kissed him full on the lips. “What do you want to do?”

The dread thing in his mind was
screaming at him, loud hysterical wails of warning and naked terror. He cared
about her, more than he was willing to admit up until this moment. In only a
day, he had decided that he could very easily love her for the rest of his life
if she would let him, and he didn’t care if that turned out to be a century or
a single day. But the experience that she yearned for was not his to give. It
was a simple fact of life that the first time you rode a bike, you probably
fell off. No shame in it. It was simply a fact. And the fact was—

“This is my… my first…” His voice was
so low, so dry, that for a moment he actually thought no sound had come out at
all, that the words existed only in the insecurities of his own brain.

“It doesn’t matter, Alex. There has
to be a first time for everything.”

He heard more than saw the zipper of
her leather jeans opening.

“Do you mean … what I mean is, are
you … is this—”

She stopped his question with a long
kiss that blew his thoughts apart like wind through autumn leaves.

“Ask me again,” she whispered, “…
another time.”

BETRAYALS

When Alex woke up, he was alone.

He lay upon the floor, half-naked,
his skin blue-white in the moonlight, the candy machine reduced to occasional
hiccups of light in one corner of its otherwise dark interior, as if the
machine itself had drifted into a fitful sleep.

Oversight was gone.

He stretched contentedly, listening
to the satisfying pops in his shoulders and spine. The room smelled faintly of
spilled beer and the sweet, spicy aroma that he associated with Oversight, and
he wondered where she might be.

There is no way to describe sex to
someone who has never had it.
An extraordinary boast he was pleased to admit was one
hundred percent correct. It was one thing to know about it, to have it
explained in school by an embarrassed health teacher, to see it done in movies,
even experimented alone with a nudie magazine. But until you actually did
it
,
you had no way of knowing how little you really knew.

He hoped Oversight liked it as much
as he did. He took his time, or tried to anyway; he thought the second time
went better than the first. He even made an effort to stay awake with her
afterwards, hoping that she would talk, tell him about herself.

But sleep—an almost ludicrous notion
at first—settled over him like the darkness, inescapable. He lay there on the
floor, breathing deeply, and allowed his mind to empty of everything except
her. She was all that mattered. Propped up on one elbow, Oversight ran her fingers
gently through his hair, and said nothing. And it was this simple touch that
undid him. He let his eyes drift shut, yielding to her ministrations, and within
moments she scattered his thoughts and sent him drifting away on dreams, her
delicate fingers weaving a clever spell.

And now she was gone.

She had said she didn’t sleep at
night. Maybe she was off sitting somewhere, an insomniac counting away the hours.
Maybe she would like some company, someone to talk to. Or maybe there was some
other way to wear away the night.

This last thought crept slyly into
his head, a simple suggestion that he politely dismissed, but not before a
moment’s consideration.
Maybe
. And repeating that one word over and over
in his mind, he untangled himself from the blanket and pulled on his jeans. He
had to use the bathroom, and while he was up, he would look for Oversight.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

Alex walked through the silence, the
night air cool against his skin, his way lit intermittently by lonely machines:
the Wurlitzer, the Pepsi machine outside, even the candy machine which guttered
to life in the waiting room behind him. Nothing else moved. Moonlight poured
through the windows, lighting the top of the stairs and showing him the
outlines of doors: the closed door to Leland’s room, the open ones to the
bathroom and the room where Ellen and Lindsay were sleeping. Through the
bathroom door, he saw moonlight shimmering off tiles and bone-white sand. So
frightening and enormous by day, the Wasteland was now a sea of azure, the
small saloon adrift in the vast oceans of night. Alex closed the door behind
him, relieved himself, and got a drink of water from the tap, cold and clean
and satisfying. He wondered, staring at his own reflection in the dark mirror,
if he would ever see the world the same way after tonight. He didn’t think so.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

When he opened the door, a faint odor
greeted him in the hallway like a week-old cat box that people hid somewhere in
their apartment, believing somehow that if you couldn’t see the tub of kitty
litter and cat turds, it wouldn’t smell as much or as bad. He looked over his
shoulder, wondering if the Saloon’s plumbing had gone south, some crucial part
of the drain disappearing like the gumball machine. But the more he
concentrated on it, the more convinced he became that it originated from Mr.
Quince’s room. The businessman’s door, closed when he came up the stairs, now
stood half-open, a light from inside the room soaking the landing in a sickly
amber glow that leeched at the moon’s blue-white luminescence.

Curious, Alex peered inside.

Standing at the foot of Leland’s bed
was Oversight, arms folded across her breasts. She was completely naked!

Alex’s feet backpedaled reflexively,
trying to keep him from seeing what he had already seen. But it was too late.
Oversight simply stood there, her exquisite body revealed to Leland Quince, the
businessman sitting up in bed wearing only a sheet. And both of them seemed so
perfectly calm, so perfectly at ease.

And all the while, Alex’s reality was
imploding.

It was that calm in her face as she
turned that made his heart stop, his limbs go numb, a feeling like he was being
transformed into wood, into stone. It crept up from his extremities and through
his limbs like poison. His eyes danced helplessly upon her, enamored and
repulsed.
Not to him
, he pleaded, hoping their lovemaking had opened
some kind of psychic channel between them.
Not to him. You gave yourself to
me. To me! Please don’t give yourself to him!

Oversight looked at him, her
expression empty. Not self-conscious or sad. Not angry or contemptuous. There
was no intent by her to make him the fool, but neither was this anything of
which she was ashamed. This simply was.

And it was that blankness more than
anything that cut through his heart like a blade of jagged steel. “Oversight…?”

His single utterance was little more
than a half-sensible gurgle in his throat, the last sound before it seized tight,
a stone wedge behind his Adam’s apple.

She took a single step towards him,
and for just a moment, he saw something in her eyes, something soft and
familiar, something he recognized from their talks about Spanish moss hanging
from the trees, something he recognized from the shadowed light of the waiting
room.

“Stop right there.”

Oversight froze at the sound of
Leland’s voice, hands hanging limply at her sides, the look in her eyes
vanishing. Leland Quince stood up, perfectly ready, perfectly calm, looking as
if he had expected this, even planned this. He walked up behind Oversight and
pressed his naked body against hers, hand reaching around to rest between her
legs. To both Leland’s indecency and Alex’s growing horror, Oversight gave only
indifference.

“But—”

“I already told you what I want,”
Leland said quietly. “And now you know what you want.” The hand between
Oversight’s legs squeezed lightly, a half-smile creeping across the
businessman’s lips. Maybe it was Alex’s shock that amused him. Or maybe the involuntary
breath Oversight drew through clenched teeth, the expressionless wince that
would be her only reaction, her singular protest. “You help me get what I want
so that I can go home, and I’ll get you what you want.”

Without realizing it, Alex felt his
hands curl into fists so tight that the bones and joints in his fingers
screamed. There was a mad rush of thoughts in his brain, insensible and
hideous, and his eyes seemed to cloud in an ugly haze of red, sharp details
stabbing his eyes like white-hot needles, a spray of sparks. But all he did was
stand there, doing nothing, his brain slowly being crushed in a vice and him
helpless to stop it.

Quince leaned over, nuzzling
Oversight’s neck. “Now close the door.”

Her hand reached out tentatively, and
Alex felt his last hope—
she’ll resist, she’ll free herself and come to me
—die,
Oversight closing her hand around the edge of the door, and pushing it shut.

For the second time that night, Alex
was alone in darkness.

*     *     *

Kreiger stood, hands clasped loosely
behind his back, toes at the edge of the barrier. If he tried very hard, he
could just make out the edges as it reflected back the moonlight. He waited
there, hearing the night sounds of the once-quiet Wasteland, smelling the wind
that held only dust and emptiness before, and the occasional stink of a carcass
being picked clean by the scavengers.

It would not be long now. He’d read
the constructs, new their strengths, their weaknesses, their flaws. And he knew
just where to push. This time would be different.

*     *     *

Blind with rage, Alex stumbled down
the darkened stairway, knees threatening to unhinge and tumble him down the
steps like a sack of old laundry. But each step grew a little more certain, a
little bolder, a little faster. He took the last four in a single, vicious
leap, hand catching the corner and spinning himself into the waiting room, his
own inertia—coupled by his complete lack of control—nearly propelling him into
the wall.

Not that he would have noticed; the
rage did not feel pain—at least, not on the outside.

The station door banged open, the
glass nearly smashing in the frame, and he leaped from the platform at a run,
never looking back, only losing himself in the darkness and the cold sea of
blue-black sand.

He hadn’t intended to go anyplace in
particular, only as far from the saloon as possible. But in the end, he found
himself exactly where he knew he would. There were no accidents. Only
unacknowledged fate. Sometimes, you did what you had to do, not because you
wanted to, or because you thought it was best or right, or even because you
agreed with it. No, sometimes you did what you had to do because it was the
only thing you knew how.

“I’ll get you the tickets on one
condition.”

The leader of the Tribe of Dust stood
toe to toe with the Caretaker’s barrier, a grim smile touching his lips as he
looked in the young man’s face. “And what might that be?”

“Oversight,” Alex said quickly, not
realizing that his hands were again clenched into tight, agonizing fists. “Send
her to the real world with me. And send Jack and Ellen and Lindsay home, too.
Quince stays behind.”

“Such venom. Has something happened?”

“That’s my condition. Take it or
leave it.”

“It’s my deal or no tickets!” Alex spat. “I’ll go straight to Jack,
otherwise. Together we’ll beat Mr. Quince senseless and leave him out here for
you to deal with all you like. But he’ll never lay hands on the tickets.
Never.”

“Never is a very long time.”

Alex felt himself trembling with
rage. “You’ll be the one to find out if you don’t take my offer. Mr.
Leland-Call-Me-Fucking-Sir-Or-Mister-Quince will
never
leave the Saloon
with your tickets. I’ll see to that personally.”

“What on earth’s gotten into you?” Kreiger
asked with feigned interest. “Or is it
you
who has gotten into
something?”

“That has nothing to do with it,”
Alex snarled, teeth clenched tight over his lie. “Those are my terms. No
strings. No tricks. If you can’t deal with ‘em, say so. I’ll walk back now, and
you can pray to whatever god still listens to the likes of you that Jack is as
big a failure as you claim. ‘Cause if he’s not, you’ll spend the rest of
eternity stuck out here pissing about how close you nearly came to getting what
you wanted.”

Kreiger smacked his tongue doubtfully
against the roof of his mouth. “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I
accept your conditions, Alex. Bring me the tickets, and Oversight’s yours. No
strings. No tricks. Go wherever you choose.”

“Do that and I’ll bring you the
tickets.”

Kreiger nodded in the darkness, his
expression unfathomable. “It’s the strangest thing, but you remind me of
another young man I knew. His name was Judas.”