The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (51 page)

Behind him, unnoticed,
Kreiger slowly rose and made his way along the fence-line, hand running lightly
across the chain-links and the hastily positioned slabs of corrugated tin like
a blind man examining an unfamiliar wall for the door he is confident will be
found.

*     *     *

Hammerlock stood facing
the wall just outside of the garage, leaning forward until his head touched the
cinderblock. He was bored.

What use a Guardian when
there is nothing to guard against?

“Hammerlock?” Jack said.

The robot leaned slowly
back from the wall and turned his attention to the Caretaker. “I’ll need the
truck tomorrow, but that’s all. Will you clean up the boneyard for me?”

The Guardian let his
attention cross the vast expanse of decaying artifacts, lost memorabilia and
forgotten dreams, and nodded before wandering away. Jack watched him a moment
longer then went inside.

Ellen sat near the front
entrance of the garage, holding her knees and staring across the silent road
into the emptiness of the Wasteland. Across from her, Anubis stared blindly, eyes
of stone. “Did you manage to get any sleep?” Jack asked.

“Some,” she said.

He came up beside her and
sat down upon the cement. Across the road were three posts of road signs, the
destinations insensible. Could a road sign really point the way to Dreams or
Sanity or Madness? Were such places really just points on a map, locations
along blue highways on a gas station road atlas? Jack wasn’t sure he knew the
answer; once maybe, but no longer.

Realizing what you do
not know is the first step on the path to enlightenment.

“Did I see Jasper out
there?” Ellen had easily acclimated to the young man’s presence.

“Probably, yes.”

“What is
he
doing
here, Jack?”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t
matter. He’ll be going home soon.”

“And what about us?”

“Yes. Soon.” She did not
ask him to be more specific, and he did not offer. Instead, he changed the
subject. “Do you want to get away from this place for a little bit? Go out into
the desert and have a picnic?”

The suggestion amused
her. “I never do know quite what to expect with you.”

“Sorry,” he replied,
though he wasn’t.

“I didn’t say I mind.”
She leaned over and gently kissed him.

Preparations were made
hastily. In the diner, they found a couple submarine sandwiches made up in the
cooler, already wrapped and ready, little single-serving packets of mayonnaise
and mustard sealed into the cellophane. Jack found a small Styrofoam cooler in
the freezer and tossed a thin layer of ice cubes on the bottom. Then he packed
the sandwiches, a couple apples, and two bottles of mint-flavored iced-tea.
Ellen borrowed a large blanket from the loft that they could sit on and met him
in front of the diner. Together they started walking, the edge of reality to
their left, ahead of them the simple emptiness of the unknown.

They walked for a while,
neither talking, until the Café was an indistinct shape behind them, so far
away that one might almost think it normal, a pale structure glinting
unobtrusively on the horizon, a rest stop on a long, empty highway in a nameless
desert, all around them only silence and blue sky and an unbroken plane of
white, dusty sand.

“Let’s stop here,” Jack
said.

Ellen nodded and shook
out the blanket, sitting down. “So what’s this about?” she said, taking off her
shoes to cool her feet.

“I thought you might want
to get away from the Café for a while,” he said, sitting down beside her. “It’s
become a little more complicated in the last few days.”

She nodded. “But why are
we here?”

Jack shrugged, avoiding
her gaze. “I wanted to talk to you … without the others around.”

She had been wondering
when this moment would come.

*     *     *

Kreiger waited by a
section of the fence, the chain covered with sheets of corrugated metal, rusted
and dinged with impact scars from carelessly thrown rocks. Nearby, two cars lay
sandwiched one atop the other, crushing one another down, both slowly being
reduced to rusted flakes and paint flecks, powdered candy apple and
midnight-black dust. Nothing lasts forever, not even here.

At least, not anymore.

Further away, the
Guardian was working on Jack’s makeshift shelter, the place the Caretaker lived
during the height of his madness. The door remained ajar, revealing a hobo’s
squat, the lyrics of an old Steely Dan song scrawled on the metal like some
kind of high school graffiti; once relevant, now meaningless. Hammerlock
started there, wrenching and prying in silent machine voracity, the trailing
pipes sunk deep into the hardpan like the roots of an old birch. When he
finally extracted the decayed hovel from the desert, Hammerlock launched it
over the edge with no more concern than a dentist discarding a rotted tooth.

Kreiger saw in that
moment the breadth and scope of Jack’s intentions, and he knew what he had to
do. Jack had given him until tomorrow morning to make his decision, but the
decision was already made. It had been made long ago, fate’s rhyme etched upon
the bedrock of the universe a thousand, thousand years before and finally
revealed. There was nothing to consider, the matter already decided.

But there was still one
loose end.

“What’s the little robot
doing, Mr. Gooseman?” Jasper asked, crossing to where Kreiger was seated. The
young man had a talent for unerringly navigating Jack’s boneyard, avoiding shards
and debris littering the ground. Kreiger thought he knew why.

“He’s tidying up,” the
wizard remarked as the robot turned his attention to the bank of television
screens mounted around a worn leather chair. Pulling the TV sets from the
ground like weeds, he ferried them four and five at a time to the edge, spilling
them unceremoniously over before heading back for more. “Anyway, I don’t expect
it’s anything you need to worry about.”

“Ellen and the man left,”
Jasper said. “They took an ice chest and a blanket and walked away.”

“Yes, I expect they’ll be
going home soon.”

Jasper looked confused.
“Don’t they live here?”

“No,” the Cast Out said,
smiling gently. Jack and Ellen did not
live
here. This was not their
home
.
No one and nothing made this place
home
. And no one truly
lived
here, not in any sense of the word. Everyone and everything at the Edge of
Madness Café, the former Sanity’s Edge Saloon, the physicality that was the
base of the Nexus, feeding from it like a creeper from the oak around which it
grows, was transient. No one and nothing belonged here; they were all simply
passing through. This was a way station, and Ellen Monroe and Jack Lantirn were
waiting for the next train out. Or coach. Or cab. Or plane. Or whatever
contrivance ferried them to the next world beyond this one. Jack could stay here
for a while; he was the Caretaker. He could stay for a very long while if he
chose. And so long as he did, Ellen could stay here with him—
provided she
wanted to
.

But eventually, they
would leave.

And eventually was
coming. That was why Hammerlock was clearing the yard; the Caretaker was the
sort who made up the bed before checking out of a hotel room.

The fallen windmill
creaked audibly as Hammerlock pushed it towards the edge, metal blades
screeching like nails on a chalkboard. Its agony persisted until the entire
contraption was pushed off the edge in a tangle of brittle wood and rusted
metal. It fell in silence, and was gone.

“So whose home is it?”
Jasper asked.

“It’s no one’s home. Not
yours. Not mine. Not theirs.” Then he gave the young man a sidelong look.
“Besides, you already have a home.”

Jasper tilted his head.

“Don’t you want to go
home, Jubjub Bird?”

Jasper’s eyes widened
with interest. “I sure do,” he said. “But I don’t know where home is. I don’t
know where anything is.”

“Don’t worry, Jubjub
Bird. I know the way home.”

Kreiger gestured towards
the fence. A section of the corrugated steel had been peeled away, perhaps by
time or wind or vandals who never existed. Someone had used a large sheet of
particle board to cover the missing slat, but you could still see behind it,
still make out the section of the chain that was cut and pulled out of shape to
make a small gap under which someone could squeeze, someone thin and wiry and
of a mind to slither in and out of a junkyard.

“From now on, things will
seem clearer,” Kreiger said. “You’re outside of my power, but I still have some
influence left. You have been privy to the world behind the illusion of
reality, and can more clearly see its boundaries, that place where the nominal
stops and the phenomenal starts.”

“The nom-in-all?” Jasper
asked, still confused.

“Never mind. I’m going to
show you the way back to your home and your grandmother. I’m sure you must miss
her terribly. I know she misses you.”

“Gramma?”

“Just go through that
hole in the fence. Slide the board aside. You remember the board, don’t you?
You’re friend taught you how to push it aside so that you could get in and out
of the junkyard. Do you remember?”

“I remember. Billy taught
me about the board. How you could get into the junkyard behind the board. But …
what about …” He lapsed into silence, eyes flicking back and forth as if
searching an invisible wall for its secrets.

The sideshow wagon, axles
locked with rust, slued sideways as Hammerlock continued clearing the yard. It
skidded momentarily then caught and rolled in a slurry of cracks, the clamor of
old, dry boards breaking all at once. The Guardian continued pushing the
wreckage across the sand until it fell over the edge and disappeared.

“You’d better go, Jasper
Desmond. This is no place for you.”

The young man nodded
politely and turned, pushing the large piece of particleboard aside to reveal
the small hole below the chain link, the worn and flattened path in the dust.
Dropping to his stomach, he slithered under and through, finding himself in the
undeveloped alley of scrub bordering Benwil’s Junkyard, the ground dappled with
shadows from the sunlight through the leaves, the air alive with the droning of
cicadas and the raucous calls of seagulls diving for scraps in the dump. Along
the fence-line, Jasper saw his bike, whole and undamaged, exactly as he left
it.

From where he stood,
Gusman Kreiger could easily see the other side of the fence. But where the
young man disappeared, nothing emerged. Beyond the chain link fence, there was
only empty desert and barren sand. Jasper Desmond was gone.

“Thank you for the ride,
Jubjub Bird.”

*     *     *

“I’m thinking we’ll leave
tomorrow,” Jack said, unable to look directly at her. It was moments like these
that made him realize he was not so different from the introverted writer
ignorantly chasing the vague promise of a lunatic into the vast unknown of the
Wasteland what seemed like years ago.

“Okay,” Ellen replied.

“Before we go, there’s
something I want to ask.”

“What?”

He felt the words, long
considered and oft-rehearsed, slip away into nothing. All he could think to say
was the first thought that popped into his mind. “I still remember the first
moment I saw you.”

“Hmm?”

 “You were on the
platform behind the Saloon. The sun was just coming up. You had this look in
your eyes; faraway, like you were still dreaming. I actually thought you were
some kind of angel.” He looked out across the sand, feeling his face flush, his
thoughts fumbling. Then he glanced at her, the way the faded denim of her jeans
clung to her legs, the way the loose shirt billowed about her, the light tan on
her arms, neck and face, her stunning eyes, tender and determined both at once.

“What did you want to ask
me, Jack?” she said gently.

“After tomorrow,
everything will change. The choices seemed simple before; uncomplicated: coffee
or tea, stay or go, sink or swim. That was all. But after tomorrow, everything
opens wide. All of our choices will be ahead of us again.”

“So?”

Jack sighed, and Ellen
thought she had never witnessed anything so easy made so difficult.
Why was
it so hard for him to admit what was so obvious?

Because unlike so many
endings before this one, he cannot simply imagine it as he has done a thousand
times already, and make it real.

“There’s something about
you that makes me … better,” Jack said. “I knew it from the very first moment
we met; I didn’t understand it, but I knew it. I don’t really know what I’ll do
after this. I only know that I don’t need this place to do it. I only need
you.” He scanned about uncertainly. “I don’t want to go back to the way I was
before I met you. We don’t exactly have a lot in common. We’re survivors washed
ashore on some remote island. After the rescue, there’s nothing to say we can’t
just go our separate ways, get back to our lives again and put all of this
behind us.” He swallowed hard, wondering how this all seemed to make sense this
morning, but now sounded like gibberish. “But I’d as soon stay here as be lost
out there alone. I’ve done that before. It doesn’t hold anything for me.”