The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (44 page)

But this did not intrigue her as much as the view of the
junkyard. Fenced in by a ramshackle barrier of chain-link, barb wire, and
corrugated sheet metal, was a tightly enclosed spectacle as fascinating in its
minutia as it was inspiring in its grandeur.

Awestruck, she descended, curiosity leading her out into the
packed dust like a child on Christmas morning, full of wonder.

A wooden windmill squeaked and clacked in the breeze beside a
two-story rocket with Buck Rogers fins and little hope of space travel, a prop
from a cheap sci-fi movie. A small, padlocked box bolted to the rocket’s launch
pad promised rocket ship rides for a quarter. An old, red pickup hunched near
the garage entrance like a dependable tool or a well-worn path.

She had dreamed of this, Jack’s madness contagious and her
infected.

She carefully picked her way through the maze of scrapyard
sentinels, nothing thrown away so much as left behind like books gathering dust
on a shelf; not useless, only not used. Science fiction robots now rusted and still,
staring in blind silence, no more certain of their existence than the faded ‘57
Chevy with its busted windshield, smashed headlights and missing wheel rims
that sat rusting on its rocker panels. A paralyzed herd of machines waited by
the fence-line like animals circled against the elements; hobbled mechanical
elephants, three still standing, another collapsed upon it side, a fifth
crashed headlong to the ground and motionless. Other steel carcasses littered
the area, incomplete, their bodies scavenged, the elephant’s graveyard at the
end of days. Half-buried in the sand, a skeleton of a long-deceased air whale beside
the ruined railroad tracks, a forgotten detail from a not-so-distant past. A
trio of lobster traps sat beside a small carnival wagon with a barred front,
whatever creature intended for display in this desert menagerie escaped or
dead. What was a manticore anyway?

A small makeshift hut
hugged the world’s edge, wind chimes softly ringing from inside, the strange
dwelling like a tree stump of metal and piping, nature and machine, the living
and the dead. Through an open hatch, she saw the remnants of a squatter’s
shelter: a blanket and sweat-stained pillow, an unwashed coffee mug, an old
coffee pot and hot plate, empty soup cans, a water-pipe.

In her dreams, Jack lived
here, lost in his own mind.

Ruined typewriters lay
scattered in the sand like stepping stones. Someone had painstakingly inscribed
song lyrics on the hatch’s door, Steely Dan’s
Do It Again
. She
remembered it from the hospital, impossible to forget, spliced into an
eight-hour loop, three times a day, seven days a week.
Wheel turning ‘round
and ‘round
. She found herself rubbing at her wrist, scars she could not
explain, could not remember, not quite.

‘Round and ‘round
.

Beside the hut was a small clearing in the sand, a cross with
a single word carved into the stone: NAIL.

She was wrong. This was
not a junkyard at all, but a
boneyard
, an unearthed grave left behind by
the unburied, the last dying where they fell, remnants of some lost tribe, the
Anasazi, the Tribe of Dust. Jack did not collect junk, only relics and tokens
and remains from the past: past lives, past memories, past dreams. And he
stored them here, a memorial to all that was gone.

Her fingers traced the
Celtic knot carved into the ancient stone, remembering another time, another
life, a gargoyle more loyal than any dog. Nail sacrificed everything to protect
her, managing even to reach back from beyond the grave, killing the Cast Out that
attacked her as she fled the Saloon.

She could almost have
allowed herself to believe that the details of her memory were as words on a
page, no more sentiment than paper and ink. But everything she remembered was
true. The stone told her so. And with that, the realization that even in a place
of limitless possibilities, death was irrefutable. What was gone was gone, and
it would never be again.

Walking back along the
edge-side of the diner, she found a bright blue door marked
RESTROOMS
, its look typical of a gas station
where such amenities were both an afterthought and an inconvenience. She peered
inside, the restroom a perverse mix of a public and private bathroom, and the
edge of a shallow wetland. The walls were partially tiled in mottled shades of
white, blue, green and gray. The floor tiles, the same black and white checkerboard
as the diner, were under a foot of water level with the bottom of the door,
nearly covering the single concrete step leading down. Lily pads floated atop
the surface, but she saw no sign of koi fish or minnows or dragonflies. Just
plants. There was a sink and mirror, a garbage can in the corner below a paper
towel dispenser, and a sea-foam green divider that offered some privacy to
anyone using the toilet in the back corner. Along the opposite wall was an
enormous claw-foot tub with an antiquated showerhead rising over it. The tub,
like the toilet and floor, was filled with water tinged green by the lilies and
cattails and rushes growing everywhere. A skylight overhead, some of the panes
broken and missing, brightened the room like a sparkling woodland glade.

Ellen sat down upon the
threshold and dipped her feet into the water, cold and refreshing, a reminder
of how hot the Wasteland sun was. If assumed to be a bathroom, it was
disgusting. But if allowed to be an urban grotto, it was surreal, even
pleasing, a natural pond of porcelain and water lilies, tiles and cattails, a
return to nature. Jack’s world was uncomplicated, existing at face value.
Stripped of the preconceptions and illusions of normalcy that made the world a
trial, it was a paradise of simplicity.

Acceptance will set
you free.

“There’s a better bathroom
on the second floor of the garage,” Jack said from behind her. He walked up
slowly, still looking sleep-worn. “It’s not as private, but it’s less overrun.”

“Thanks, but I already
found it,” she answered. “I was just enjoying the shade.”

“Are you okay?”

“Uh-hmm.”

He came up beside her and
sat down, leaning back against the doorframe.

“It won’t go away again,
will it?” she asked. “Like last time, I mean.”

“No, that was different.
I wasn’t the Caretaker then. The focal lens has been replaced, and I understand
everything so much better than before. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon was borrowed;
it couldn’t last.”

“Borrowed?”

“It was left to me by
Algernon. Nothing borrowed ever lasts for long. Sooner or later, you have to
give it back, make something of your own. Or you lose it.”

“And all of this is yours?”

Jack offered a smile. “I
guess you could say that.”

“Have you ever considered
the possibility that you really are crazy?”

Jack stared out at the
empty world of open sky beyond the edge. “Once, maybe, but not now. Normal is just a word that describes people you don’t know very well. I think it was Oscar
Wilde who said that … or something to that effect. Crazy is nothing more than a
person traveling in opposition to the prevailing mindset. Time is flexible
until proven to be a constant, then a constant until proven to be variable. If
you talk to God, you’re praying. If he talks back, you’re a lunatic. Believe in
God, and you’re well adjusted. If God believes in you, you’re either a prophet
or a heretic—depending upon who’s writing the history book. A terrorist is evil,
a patriot noble; both blow up buildings to make their point. The kind of
insanity that you’re talking about isn’t a state or a disease; it’s a social
condition. If I don’t cry at my mother’s funeral, I’m insane. If I cry over the
death of a movie star, I’m insane. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, to
get my head in order, I suppose. And I’ve stopped worrying about the labels.”

“Is that what you’re
still doing here?” she asked in all seriousness. “Getting your head in order?”

“Yes and no.”

She leaned over to nudge
him with her shoulder, playful and meaningful both at once. “How about a
straight answer?”

“I was waiting for you.”

“How did you know I’d
come back?”

“I didn’t.”

“And what would you have
done if I never came back? If I’d stayed back there and kept working at the
bookstore, going to the coffee shop, leading a normal life?”

“I would have gone on
waiting. When you left, you took a part of me with you. I knew then that I
would wait as long as necessary, forever if I had to. But I wouldn’t leave you
behind.”

Ellen reached out, gently
touching his temple with her fingers, feeling the heat off his skin. “We hardly
have anything in common. Thrown together by circumstance, we barely know each
other. So how can you be so certain?”

“Aren’t you?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Then why worry about the
circumstances. Everyone meets by accident, or fate if you choose to call it
that. But no one dictates how things happen.”

“You do,” she said.

He was quiet for a
moment, and Ellen thought he was considering his answer, shaping the words so
that they might make sense, persuading himself even if he could not persuade
her. Another moment passed, and still he did not answer her. Ellen thought he
might not.

Then: “It’s different.”

More silence, more
thoughtful answers. Ellen realized that it was not an answer Jack was offering,
but a confession.

“I didn’t design how we came together, or how we feel. I only
constructed a way back, a means to find your way. But everyone chooses their
own course.”

“In a world built from
daydreams and imagination, who we are may be the only thing that’s real,” Ellen
said softly.

“This place is real
enough,” Jack said defensively. “It can provide comfort and shelter, cause pain
and sadness. You can live here and you can die here. What more is there to
reality?”

“But it’s not real the
way the rest of the world is real. This is an asylum, Jack, a controlled
environment of your own devising. There is a world more real than this one;
it’s out there. We came from that world a lifetime ago. Shouldn’t we go back?”

“We will. When we’re
ready.”

She nestled closer, head
against his shoulder, comforted by the feeling of certainty, of warmth. “Where
will we go?”

“Wherever we want. I
wasted so many years of my life living out other people’s goals and dreams, so
much time conforming to a misplaced set of beliefs and boundaries until I
believed I was content with the hole I was in. Algernon showed me another way,
and I can never go back again. We’ll go when we’re ready. And we’ll go wherever
we like. Life’s too short to waste on anything less.”

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

They held each other in
the shade of the building, seated by a grotto of porcelain and tile and water
lilies, and for a time they were as lovers reunited beneath the shade of a
willow on the shores of a private lake known only to those who dream.

*     *     *

They
slept together that night, holding each other close; spoons in a drawer.
Pressed tightly to Jack, feeling his naked skin against hers, the safety of his
arms around her, Ellen slept without dreams.

The following morning,
Ellen woke up not for dreams or nightmares or even an alarm clock, but from
hunger. Time might be meaningless, the café trapped in an everlasting present, but
hunger was real.

She snuggled into Jack’s
embrace, trying to ignore it, but it wouldn’t go away. She finally slithered
out from under the covers, disentangling herself from Jack. He slept
surprisingly heavy; maybe still recovering from his marathon of writing. Or
maybe he simply enjoyed the peace that came from her presence. It was nice to
believe that might be the case, that she might be as good for him as he was for
her.

Maybe it was even true.

She walked quietly to the
toilet, the desert air cold against her skin, the muscles in her legs still stiff
from yesterday. Time aboard the dream flyer seemed irrelevant, but the soreness
in her muscles risked to differ, further supporting the argument for staying in
bed a little longer. Details of the mezzanine emerged with the new light, dawn reflecting
through the lower garage like a river of amber.

In this, the strangest of
all places, she finally felt like she was on the path to normalcy.

Noise from the toilet and
even the shower curtain rings against the rod raised little more than a muffled
grunt from Jack, so she took her time; there was nowhere to go, nothing to be
late to, no one to be late for. Just the present, the invigorating spray
against her skin, the warm cascade of water through her hair and down her body,
each breath filled with steam. Every muscle yielded to it, melting her into the
water and the heat, revitalizing her. Who had she been before she met Jack? She
wasn’t really sure, her life a collection of moments in the present, the future
unpredictable, the past unalterable.

Who was she before?

It doesn’t matter.

Who was she now?

You are complete.

When she stepped from the
shower, Jack was awake, watching her through half-closed lids as she toweled
off. She let him, the idea making her spine tingle. Then she sat down on the
boards to gather up her clothes, dangling her feet over the edge like a child on
a seaside dock. “Do you mind if I borrow a clean shirt?” she asked.

“Go ahead. There should
be something in the green duffel bag under the bed.” Then he got up and went to
the recently vacated shower.

Ellen rummaged the duffel
bag, finding a large, white T-shirt. That and jeans would have to do until she
could find some clothes for herself. She left the rest of yesterday’s dirty
laundry in a tidy pile; she would deal with it later. “I’m gonna go downstairs
to the diner for something to eat,” Ellen said over the spray of water.

Jack poked his head from
the edge of the shower curtain, water dripping from his hair and face. “I’ll be
down in a few minutes, but go ahead without me.”

“I’ll wait,” she said,
kissing him softly on the mouth, tasting mostly water as it ran down his face.
She quickly turned away and went down the stairs.

Jack arrived ten minutes
later, hair still wet. Already the morning was warming up into another summery
day. Another day like yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.
And tomorrow would be no different.

Ellen sat at their small
booth in the corner, a cup of coffee already poured, its aroma a blend of
hazelnut and charred wood, the suggestion of predilections, compulsions,
addictions. She made a cup for Jack, cream and sugar the way he liked it.

Breakfast was simple.
Jack produced a few frozen bagels from the walk-in freezer and an old toaster
from beneath the counter. He’d managed to locate some cream cheese and a
half-empty jar of raspberry jelly that, to Ellen, tasted like summers spent in
the country, sweet and nostalgic, a flavor instantly capable of evoking
memories she was not sure were entirely her own. Memories of days that seemed
less complicated somehow by the distance of time, the filter of years that
allowed you to forget the things that were unimportant, and keep only the
things you liked well enough to remember.

After breakfast, they
made love.

They had both risen from
the booth, Jack about to clear the dishes when Ellen leaned in to kiss him on
the lips.

“You taste like
raspberries,” she said.

“So do you.”

They ended up on the
floor, sprawled naked upon the checkered tiles, each reveling in the other,
survivors of a desert crossing who could never again look to water the same
way.

Holding one another, they
lay on the floor, the air cooling their skin, a silence like the world beneath
the ocean.

“How much of this is
real?” Ellen asked.

“All of it,” he said. “We’re
a million miles from anyone or anything recognizable as normal, but that
doesn’t make it any less real.” Then he turned away and started to get dressed,
looking uncomfortable about his answer, as if he had said too much.

“What about the past?”
Ellen asked. “The time before the Nexus and the Edge and the Wasteland? I
hardly remember any of it anymore, only you and I. But nothing before. Was
there a past before my job at
Dabble’s Books
, before the daily coffees
at
Serena’s
, that first morning at the Sanity’s Edge Saloon? I don’t remember
any of it except in bits and flashes.”

“You’re not a construct
like Kreiger claimed if that’s what you’re asking,” Jack said. “There’s no such
thing. Kreiger never realized that. You came to this place the same way I did,
and we each had a life before. Accident or fate, call it what you like, but we
found ourselves here. I was meant to be the Caretaker. You were supposed to be
passing through. Something happened along the way.”

“But how much of it is
real?”

Jack smiled unevenly.
“Some of it. All of it. None of it. It depends on what you mean by real.”

“Reality isn’t usually subject
to interpretation,” she said. “It is, or it isn’t.”

“I think it can be more
complicated than that,” he answered. “Reality can be like the floor or the
table or air, or it can be what you believe.”

“Just because you believe
in something doesn’t make it real.”

Dressed only in jeans,
Jack retrieved his coffee cup from the table and went to get a refill, his
third. Somewhere in their distraction, the breakfast dishes disappeared,
leaving only the coffee cups behind. If Jack thought this was unusual, he gave
no indication. “If you limit reality to what can be demonstrated, it breaks
down, flies apart. I can demonstrate the evolution of species over time, the
failure and extinction of some, the survival and success of others. But there
are literally millions who would argue against me, say that I was wrong,
spiritually misguided, even ungodly. In their world, their
reality
, I’m
a heretical lunatic. Over two billion people assert the existence of an
all-powerful, all-knowing God they have never seen nor heard, but who came to
earth as a man born of a virgin, and died that we could live on past our
mortality as souls they similarly cannot prove, but which they contend are both
real and incontrovertible. They don’t believe in ghosts, but their belief in
the soul is unwavering. That belief is reality.”

Jack stirred his coffee
with undo attention, avoiding Ellen’s expression. She had pulled on her clothes
during his speech, one she was sure he had made to himself a dozen times,
repetition helping to support his theory. But in the open air, it sounded
flawed and impractical, proselytizing for the sake of argument. Jack glanced up
and shrugged, the clinking spoon falling silent. “We can live here if we want.
And we can die here whether we like it or not. How much more real does it need
to be?”

Ellen considered his
answer for a moment, and asked, “How long can we stay?”

“As long as we want. As
long as we need.”

There was a catch, Jack’s
answer too carefully worded for her not to notice. They could leave anytime
they wanted. But make no mistake; eventually, they would leave.

But when we leave, will we leave together? Or is this
place just an illusion that we have convinced ourselves is real? Is it doomed
to be unbound, undone by the reality of a world in which a former mortgage
company analyst with a penchant for writing genre-fiction in his spare time
would have no reason to know an ex-junkie mental patient working a job in a
bookstore on a release program negotiated by her rich father to keep her out of
jail or a mental institution.
There would be no love, no friendship, no
connection. They would not even be acquaintances, theirs the simple anonymity
of strangers whose lives were not intertwined, not intricately connected, not
even accidentally joined by happenstance, but paths that passed and continued
on, unaware, unconcerned.

And she still had not forgotten the wristband, the broken
window, the blood; scars she did not remember getting, but there all the same.

She said nothing, some questions not worth having answered,
especially when there was nothing you could do about it. Instead she said, “I’d
like to stay here a little longer.”

“Okay.”

Joining him behind the counter, she poured herself a cup of
coffee. “So what will we do here all alone?”

Jack smiled, an expression both sincere and a bit
mischievous. “Stay up late, sleep in, and hopefully have more breakfasts like
this one.” It seemed to please him to see her blush slightly at the remark.
Then he added. “But I think mostly we’ll spend the time remembering the things
from our past that we want to take with us, and forgetting those things we
would rather leave behind. No one can tell us who we are anymore.”

Ellen offered no reply; there was nothing left to say.

“I need to do some writing,” he confessed. “If I don’t do it now,
I’ll forget what I want to say.”

She smiled reassuringly.
There were things about Jack that she understood, and this was one of those
things: writers write. “Find me when you’re finished.”

He nodded. “I’m glad
you’re here.”

He turned and walked out
through the kitchen, leaving the door open to the boneyard of scraps and
memories.

*     *     *

Ellen walked barefoot
amidst the derelict machines and discarded memorabilia, unconcerned about
debris in the sand. It only looked like a junkyard. There were no edges of
glass or rusty screws or half-buried jags of shredded metal. The yard was as
clean as a deserted beach or a lonely desert or a country cemetery—one littered
with sculptures of modern art and industrial wreckage. The fencing felt
inconsistent to her, without purpose or merit; like erecting a white picket
fence around a house in the badlands, a wall to separate the dust in one’s yard
from the dust without, an effort in vain at simulating normalcy. There was
nothing out in the Wasteland to fence away; nothing trying to leave and nothing
trying to get in because there was nothing on either side of the fence. All
that remained was her and Jack and a faded world of memories and used-up
relics.

Ellen shaded her eyes
against the unrelenting sun blistering every surface it touched, time its ally
in an endless war upon reality. But for her, it was a welcome sight, a reminder
of summer days at the beach, lazy afternoons, the smell of coconut oil and
lemonade. She panned the forgotten machines, some scoured by the elements to
bare metal, others clinging to the faded skin of paint that was their former
lives, refusing to move on: a world of endings and beginnings, of unlimited
possibilities.

She walked back into the
garage, the cement glass-smooth and cool against her feet. Above, Jack clicked
away at his keyboard, sentences flowing with halts and starts; they were
hard-won words for him this time. She supposed it could be like that. Every
moment of a writer’s life was not one long bout of fruitful inspiration. Not every
moment.

She went to the Pepsi
machine and found the button she was looking for second from the bottom. She
pushed it and the machine chugged out an icy can of Country Time Lemonade. One
of Jack’s improvements: an end to the need for loose change to feed the vending
machines.

She doubled back to the
red pickup where she remembered seeing an Indian blanket wadded up in the bed.
She took it and walked to the back of the fence where the old cars were left to
die, and picked out a two-tone Impala, sky-blue and white, the hood and rooftop
the color of the sky fading into the endless desert. Though scavenged for parts—missing
headlights, glass, tires, engine, and even the driver’s side door—the vehicle
appeared undamaged. Ellen spread the blanket out on the Impala’s roof, then
climbed up on the trunk and undressed. Naked, she stretched out on her stomach
under the warm sun, placed her cheek against the blanket, one arm folded up
around her head, the other holding the icy-slick can of lemonade. She supposed
that from where he was, Jack might catch a glimpse of her if he was looking; if
he wanted to.

She smiled, the warmth of
the sun carrying her into a lazy daydream of summertime memories. There had
been good times in her youth; yes, there had been some. Visits to her
grandparents upstate, estranged from her years later along with her mother who
finally decided she wanted nothing to do with Gabriel Monroe; nothing to do
with him or anything of his. And that included Ellen, his possession by association—his
possession because he liked to possess things more than he liked the things he
possessed. But before then, there had been summers in the country, summers
spent swimming in a backcountry pond, exploring the woods, climbing trees,
lying in the sun. There was a boy from down the road; they played together over
the summer and stayed friends after they turned too old to play children’s
games; after the nature of games changed. Running through the woods became
walks in the forest, swimming and sunning offered intriguing glimpses of flesh,
a bare torso or a naked shoulder blade, anything more still forbidden, still
more imagined than real. There was an offered kiss. A pleasant return.