The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (9 page)

“I was thinking about Jack, about when we were together back
in the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.”

“Would you like to talk about that?”

If she was careful—helpful, but not too helpful; informative,
but not too informative—she could possibly show him one part of her mind, and draw
him away from the secret, special places, leaving him to glance at some things
while examining nothing. She was not insane. All of it was real, and Kohler
would never understand it, and would succeed only in destroying it if given the
opportunity. And that, above all else, she could not allow.

Jack needed her.

Almost as much as I need him.

Kohler mistook her silence for willfulness. “We’ve talked
about this world of yours before, haven’t we, Ellen?” he prodded softly, his
tone less open, more accusatory. “A place where events are manipulated by
magic, by … Jack.”

She nodded, eyes scanning the low-pile rug of Dr. Kohler’s
office, thinking only:
where does anyone find such ugly carpeting?

“And there was no one else in this world, is that right?” She
didn’t answer, or even nod; Dr. Kohler wasn’t looking for her affirmation. He
was thinking out loud, her presence no more integral to the process than that
of the furniture or the ugly carpeting. “No authority figures. No commonplace
people. No one at all, in fact. Just you and Jack and a few others, like
castaways on a deserted island, besieged by a group you called the Tribe of
Dust.”

“They called
themselves
the Tribe of Dust,” Ellen
said. It seemed a valid distinction, but she could not explain why.

“Just so,” Kohler acknowledged. “But I think the point here
is that even these people went away, one by one, until you were left alone with
Jack. You told me that you were alone with him at first, and then others came
along. And then they started to leave until, in the end, it was just you and
Jack and these outcasts—”

“Cast Outs,” she corrected.

“—who lived outside of your safe haven, and were trying to
destroy it.”

“The Saloon was breaking down,” she said, and immediately
wished she hadn’t.
Give him nothing
, she thought fiercely. And fast
after that,
I wish I was with Jack
. Once, in what felt like a lifetime
ago, she had only wanted to be away from the Saloon and its crazy caretaker.
Now she wanted nothing more than to return there, to know that she wasn’t
crazy, that all of it was real, and that Jack was real, and that he loved her
still. He did. He must! He wouldn’t forget about her like everyone else.

Would he?

“That’s right. I remember you telling me that things were
disappearing, that the magic was running out of the saloon.” Kohler tapped his
notebook lightly with his pen. “Your fabricated reality was eroding as you
began to come to grips with the true reality, the saloon being a defensive
mechanism enabling your escape, a world safely hidden within your own mind,
governed by simplistic problems with easily rendered solutions, juvenile
displays of magic or violence. The saloon served as your escape from the
depression and anxiety that led to your breakdown and attempted suicide, a
means of escaping the trauma of being attacked by Leonard Tucker, and the fact
that you were forced to kill him. It was a way to escape your
institutionalization, the drug therapy, the electroshock. The human mind is
remarkably complex, Ellen, able to safeguard itself from a variety of threats
by discarding facts and inventing fantasies that it then allows itself to
believe in and react to exactly as if they were real. Doing so gives the mind
the time it needs to heal itself. And as your mind heals, it slowly and
methodically deconstructs the fantasy world, ultimately destroying it and
forcing you back into reality. The Saloon was destroyed, Jack left behind, all
your personal demons slain, and yourself returned back to a normal life. You
had the opportunity to reassess your interaction with people through Jack. You
permitted yourself to be intimate with him, to be emotionally open and
vulnerable with him. He accepted you without question just as you designed him
to.”

Dr. Kohler’s usual fishing expeditions had run their course,
and now he was reeling in his nets. Like it or not, Kohler was no mouse
scurrying through a maze and she was no lab assistant mischievously relocating
the cheese. Dr. Kohler was not so simpleminded or so easily duped.
And oh,
by the way, sweetheart,
you
are the cheese
. Kohler had satisfied
himself with what he had found, and was moving on to phase two: addressing the
problem that was Ellen Monroe. He sought out the secret wounds and private
holes she thought so carefully hidden, and probed their edges, his examination
frighteningly intimate like the cold touch of a metal instrument. He would
destroy her dreams; reduce Jack to mind-candy, a dream-lover fading under the
light of dawn, a mental schism, a coping mechanism to ease her transition back
to normalcy. And when it was all done, he would expect her to be grateful.

And you thought Lenny was the rapist.

“Doesn’t telling me this make it harder for you?” she asked.

“I need you to confront your fantasy world; see it for what
it is.”

She would sooner die than let Kohler destroy Jack and his
world!

Wasn’t that how you found yourself here?

“Did you bring the book with you?” Dr. Kohler asked.

She looked up, startled, a liar caught in a lie. And not just
by anyone; this felt like getting caught by a cop. She remembered that,
remembered lying to cops, getting caught. Maybe it was when she killed Lenny.
Or maybe it was from before, that gray period of emptiness where she assumed
her entire past hid, the unturned pages of a new book waiting to be read and
revealed.

But Kohler was not the gentle reader; he was the obsessed
psychiatrist with cold, hurtful fingers, predatory eyes, and weasel teeth. And
he had asked her a question that she thought he might already know the answer
to.

She tried to mask her expression, but it was too late; Kohler
had seen her hesitation and was curious. He had fingered a raw nerve, much to
his delight, and now, just to be sure, he poked it a few more times, attuned to
the reflexive jerk and yelp of pain.

“I believe you told me once that you carried the book with
you everywhere, that you’d reread it more times than you could count. I’d like
to borrow it.”

“W-what for?” she asked.

“I want to read it. I think it might shed some light on your
situation, and assist in your therapy.”

Don’t let him have it! Don’t let him take it away!
“I
didn’t bring it with me, today.”

“No?” Her answer left him strangely pleased. “I thought you
said you took it with you everywhere? Were you exaggerating?”

Exaggerating was shrink-speak for lying. Was she lying then,
or was she lying now? Either way, he wanted her admission of the deception like
some Catholic school priest interrogating a student.

“I left it with my boss, Mr. Dabble,” she said quickly. “He
thought he could figure out where it came from.”

“But you don’t think he can, do you?” Dr. Kohler asked
pointedly.

She wasn’t sure how to answer, what to say to make the weasel’s
teeth let go. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t think you’re being entirely honest with me, Ellen,”
he said.

“He asked to borrow it just this morning,” Ellen replied,
shifting in the chair. She uncrossed her legs, the slit in the front of her
dress opening across her thigh. “He said he would return it to me tonight. I …
I didn’t see the harm as long as it was just for the afternoon.”

Kohler opened his mouth to reply then seemingly forgot what
he was about to say.

Ellen almost thought to give him more, a brief glimpse
higher, but didn’t. It would make him suspicious; if he thought it an accident,
he might not recognize the hook inside the lure, too arrogant to credit her
with sufficient craft to outwit him. He was an educated psychiatrist; she was
the delusional, drug-addicted daughter of a businessman with political
aspirations. A rich brat at best, cunning but not clever.

And it would have been for nothing if Kohler didn’t willingly
pursue it. She might be crazy—she couldn’t rule out the possibility—but she
wasn’t stupid. He never did anything deliberately unsavory, but her instincts
weren’t wrong. Not about Jack, and not about Dr. Kohler. His was not like the
second glance afforded the checkout girl with the low-cut top, or the leer
given to the college students roller-skating through the park in short-shorts.
Kohler was a predator who needed to control. Any patient unwilling to cede that
to him would eventually receive the speech that started,
“I’m afraid we
don’t seem to be making a lot of progress. Perhaps it’s best if we consider a
change in your therapy…”

She sometimes wondered what kind of fucked-up childhood left
him with such profound issues. In the dark recesses that no one talked about,
Kohler’s needs exceeded ego, hovering on the edge of pathology. His expression,
eyes momentarily fixated on her bare skin, objectifying, dissecting her into
manageable pieces and discarding what defied his understanding or simply failed
his interest.

He also wore too much cologne.

“Uhm… I…” Kohler tore his gaze away, collecting his thoughts
by focusing on the notepad in front of him, drumming the page with the pen. He
cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m not certain we’re making progress,
Ellen. Perhaps it would be best if we considered changing our approach. At
Friday’s session, I would like you to bring the book with you. I think it’s
instrumental in how you’re coping with the real world, and why you can’t
remember your past. At some point, you need to acknowledge that Jack is
imaginary. However useful, he doesn’t come from this world.”

Too often, Kohler talked about
this
world and
this
reality, as if
this
was the only one and he the guide back to it, a
shepherd to the wayward. All just psychobabble. There were more worlds than
this. Here, she was out of place, no past and nothing to weigh her down or keep
her grounded or make her belong. Jack’s reality, the Sanity’s Edge Saloon and
the Wasteland, was just as real, just as substantial as her apartment, the
coffee shop, the bookstore. Nothing was any more real than anything else.

At least, not for her.

The inability to differentiate fantasy from reality is a
hallmark of the insane mind.

“Are you still having trouble sleeping?” Dr. Kohler asked
after a brief, empty pause.

“Sometimes,” she answered, wondering at the shift in course.
And
when did you tell him you were having trouble sleeping?

“And the dreams? Are you still having them?”

“Yes.”

“What about nightmares?”

“Sometimes.”
Where is this going?

“Do your nightmares wake you up?”

“No.” But her response was too slow, too considered. He would
know she was lying.

“Can you describe some of these nightmares for me?” he asked
with forced evenness. “Is it an image that you find frightening, or an
uncomfortable situation? Or is it just a sense of terror?”

This was a mistake. He would learn things about her, secrets
she did not want him to have. But if she refused, there would be only one
conclusion:
carte blanche
for more severe measures. Lack of cooperation
could get her sent back to the hospital, put back on sedatives and mood
suppressors, trapped behind padded walls and white non-dreams, her life ticking
away like a clock and her no more cognizant of it than a potted spider plant. As
for Jack, he would die, forgotten, alone, lost in the maze of her excised
dreams, discarded as callously as a bloody clot of cancerous tissue:
hermetically sealed, incinerated,
gone
.

“I’m always alone,” she said reluctantly.
Forgive me,
Jack; I don’t know any other way.
“Jack is there. I see him, but he can’t
see me. It’s like I’m a ghost. I don’t know. In my nightmares, we can’t
connect. I can’t touch him or talk to him. Something’s always keeping us apart,
or I’m not substantial enough to reach him. We both talk, but he’s only talking
to himself. I try to answer, but he can’t hear me.”

“Besides talking to himself, what is Jack doing?” Kohler
asked, seemingly nonplussed. “What about this frightens you?”

“I don’t know. Feeling helpless, maybe. Jack’s alone,
suffering. I can see what he’s doing, but I can’t do anything for him.”

“What’s he doing?”

“He’s writing. He’s always writing.” The dream from this
morning, like so many mornings, came back to her, and she allowed herself to
slip into its reality. “He’s alone in the Wasteland. The sun has burned his
skin raw and red, peeling away in radioactive flakes. Sometimes he’s blind; the
constant burning sun has scorched his eyes. He’s living on insects and garbage,
whatever he can find and put into his mouth. And all the while, he’s
desperately trying to write on a broken typewriter with missing letters and
fractured teeth. His fingers keep working the keys, battering away at the
archaic machine until they’re bloody and swollen. But nothing’s getting
written.”

“And why do you think that is?”

“He’s out of paper … and ink. And out of time. And maybe even
out of his mind.”

“So why do you think he keeps trying to write?”

“He’s trying to get home.” And the suddenness of the
realization, the vividness of her recall, tightened her throat, brought tears
to her eyes. “And I can’t help him. I’m supposed to, but I don’t know how.”

“And then what happens?”

“I wake up.” She looked up at Kohler then. “I know you don’t
believe me. I know you think it’s just a delusion, but it’s not. Jack is real.
He saved me. And now he needs me to save him. Only I can’t. He never told me
what to do.”