Ellen called after him, “Why is it so easy for you to believe in something totally inexplicable, but so impossible for you to accept that all this might just be in your head?”
He looked back, and saw beneath her challenge a very genuine interest in his answer, a search for truths that eluded her, had perhaps always eluded her. Join the club. What he wanted to say back to her was, If I’m right, then you’re not alone somewhere, crazy and arguing with a figment of your imagination. I believe that you and I are real and that this place is real because that’s all I have left to believe in. Without that, I’m lost.
That was the truth and he wanted to tell her that. But he didn’t. He didn’t think she would understand. Instead, he said, “I don’t know. Maybe because I’m an asshole.”
Then he turned and went upstairs.
* * *
Ellen didn’t believe Jack was a hallucination or a dream, but she wasn’t yet ready to accept this reality; not that easily.
The memories of the hospital—neither so distant nor blurred by this recent sidestep of worlds—could not be dismissed. What if the Sanity’s Edge Saloon and its passionate, misinformed caretaker were little more than byproducts of having electricity blown through her temples in an ill-conceived effort to burn the madness from her brain? Maybe Jack wasn’t real? But then, maybe she wasn’t real either. Maybe she was just an internalized representation of herself…
… whose hair smells like puke.
She swallowed the last of Jack’s coffee and walked over to the foot of the spiral stair. She heard the sounds of someone battering away at a keyboard, fingers tapping out words, stringing together sentences. Was Jack a writer? Well, a caretaker for an abandoned saloon in the middle of the biggest, emptiest desert in the entire universe certainly had few responsibilities and plenty of time to pursue other interests.
Especially when the only people getting off the train at this particular junction are bitchy lunatics in straitjackets.
“Jack,” she called up the stair. “Would it be all right if I used your bathroom to clean up?”
The answer came back with forced disinterest. “Sure.”
“Thanks.” Under less outlandish circumstances, she might have found his behavior amusing. Like a puppy, he was eager to please and easily hurt by anyone not responding to his good intentions. But here—wherever and whatever here was—Jack was simply good-hearted … and naive.
As were many of her drug-induced hallucinations, champions and angels intent on helping her. The rest were sick, demented fucks. She considered Jack part of the former, but it only reinforced her original supposition: this was all in her head, a ruptured embolism in her imagination, and she was quickly bleeding out.
She locked the door behind her—old precautions from a prior reality—and started running a bath in the old-fashioned tub. She found an extra toothbrush in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror, brand new and still in the package, and brushed the taste of stale coffee out of her mouth. That was the thing about coffee; five minutes after you were done, it tasted like you swallowed sour milk. She never understood people who craved it; of course, she never understood people who craved anything. All she craved was an escape, a way out; any means to that end, regardless of what it was, elicited her interest.
She stripped down and climbed into the steaming tub, affording only a cursory glance at the emptiness surrounding her. Sand and sky, a vast expanse of nothing, the sole occupants her and a naïve caretaker named Jack.
She’d hurt his feelings. She should have known better, deliberately prodding him about his grasp on reality. Personal experience had taught her early on that most people were particularly vulnerable in their perceptions of their own normalcy.
Ellen allowed herself to sink down below the surface until she was completely submerged. Jack was okay. And this place did feel like reality, strange though it may be. The water was hot. The tub was slippery. There was verdigris embedded in the crevices of the brass. And her hair smelled like vomit, a detail she certainly would have left out of even the deepest, most intricate hallucination or drug-induced psychotic episode. Even now, her lungs burned from holding her breath.
No, this had to be reality. A side seldom seen—like the dark side of the moon—but real just the same. The Saloon. Jack. The emptiness that stretched for a million miles in all directions. All real. Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Ellen Monroe. Sorry the conductor lost your luggage. Look in the closet if you need a change of clothes, and there’s an extra toothbrush in the medicine chest. Madness, my dear. Sweet, sweet madness. But do feel free to stay awhile. Make yourself at home.
She burst up through the surface of the water, blowing out a burning lungful of air in a misty spray, and wondered if she would ever figure this out. She felt clear. No fatigue, no jitters, no head-spins. No crawling or writhing parasites slithering just under the skin, their torment encouraging you to claw off your own flesh. No, she wasn’t coming down and she wasn’t flying. She felt … good. Not a high kind of good, but a clean, sober, calm good. It was a feeling she remembered from a long, long time ago; a time before all the drugs and all the problems with her father; a time when her mother was still around and things seemed … simpler.
She even felt hungry.
But if she wasn’t high, how did she explain this place? she wondered, pulling the stopper on the drain.
Towels were left on the splayed, webbed hands of a small statuary frog sitting in the corner like a dog doing a trick. An unusual row of horns ran up the frog’s nose to form a crest upon its head while its gaping mouth held a pair of washcloths and some soap in a mother-of-pearl dish. Ellen stood up, steam rising from her skin, and arched her back until she heard the soft, satisfying pops of her spine shifting back into place. Then she took one of the towels from the frog’s raised hands to dry herself, and discovered the metal frog’s other unusual feature: an enormous, brass erection.
She was startled less by the frog’s extra appendage—little more than a puerile joke—than her own embarrassment by it. She drew the towel close around herself, listening suspiciously to the silence.
But no one was there. She was being paranoid.
Far across the desert, eyes slitted against the blowing sand, the Dust Eater observed the movements of the naked woman, less a person or an object of desire than a presence; a second presence. Now two occupied heaven. It turned and raced across the hardpan, gangly legs carrying it with frightening speed towards the master; he would want to know what was happening.
Its flight, much like its presence, went unnoticed at the saloon.
Ellen dressed quickly and went downstairs, combing out her wet hair as she went. Breakfast, she thought, her hunger growing in leaps and bounds. She wasn’t sure what she was in the mood for, but neither was she sure what was available, fairly certain the latter would limit her options.
She refilled her coffee cup from the large, brass-and-copper urn, the aroma smelling faintly of Irish cream. On impulse, she filled a second cup, hoping to persuade Jack to join her for breakfast. It would make for a good peace offering, and since it appeared they were the only two people for a billion miles, it was probably in their best interest to get along.
She took her coffee with her as she searched out breakfast behind the bar, amused by the caffeine buzz—coffee drinkers made laughable addicts. They pursued their highs through overpriced espressos and cappuccinos when all they really needed to do was drop some ice and hang on for a real ride. But the coffee tasted exceptionally good. Maybe it was a carryover from whatever they shot her up with in the hospital; it sometimes affected her sense of taste.
Assuming that the hospital was also reality.
In the refrigerator she found a pitcher of orange juice, half a stick of butter littered with toast crumbs, and a small plastic jug of maple syrup. She looked at the unlikely collection of staples for half a moment, then reared back to look at the jack straw collection on the shelves under the bar. On the bottom shelf was an electric
griddle half-buried by a package of paper napkins and flexy-necked straws. How convenient.
“I don’t suppose you have any pancake mix back here, do you Jack?”
* * *
Jack’s efforts at writing yielded nothing but the realization that he’d behaved stupidly; Ellen was right to question everything around them, and he was foolish to insist on her blind acceptance. Halfway into a pot of coffee and a bad scenario involving a hero very much like himself, he realized this to be true. The story he was writing also involved a beautiful woman; her interest in such a worthless character was unbelievable. He read and reread the paragraph, liking it no better for every revision and change of phrase. Finally, he sent it to data purgatory, that shapeless, gray hell of stray bits of data blasted apart and scattered like leaves before an angry, ineffectual god.
No wonder Ellen thought he was an asshole.
He made a quick journal entry, but it was little more than a description of Ellen. What she was like, how she looked, the expression she wore while staring out over the Wasteland earlier, lost and alone in the early shadows, winsome.
Better, but still mostly crap.
Her insistence that this place wasn’t real opened a decidedly unsettling possibility: she might be right. And he might be insane, a delusional, paranoid schizophrenic. Maybe she wasn’t real, and this place wasn’t real. Cognitive disassociation, a complete break with reality. Maybe everything after losing his job was a fantasy to fill in where his breakdown took over. No Writer. No train. No Cross-Over Station. Just crazy Jack Lantirn; he lost his job then he lost his mind, and he’s never coming back.
But I’m not crazy. This is real. I’m real. I’m not her delusion and she’s not mine.
Easy to say, hard to prove.
What bothered him most was that he found himself liking Ellen Monroe in spite of her insistence that he didn’t really exist. Maybe it was because he was alone, and maybe it was because he found her pretty in no way he could exactly define, or maybe it was the way she seemed somehow familiar, a nonsensical impression from a total stranger of a kindred soul.
Not that he had any business thinking about her like that. His relationship with Jools ended barely a week ago, and despite his bravado two nights before, he was still carrying a lot of baggage.
Besides, what interest would Ellen possibly take in him? A mediocre analyst and a failed writer who bore a striking resemblance to a gawky scarecrow, only less graceful. And, lest he forget, no job (unless you counted caretaker of the Saloon), no place to live (except the Saloon), and no solid prospects (unless the Writer’s claims about the Saloon proved true). What could a failed dreamer offer a dream-junkie, anyway?
“Jack?”
He turned and leaned out over the spiral stair. Ellen was staring up at him, hair still wet, eyes bright, smile endearing. “What?”
“Peace offering? We got off on the wrong foot. You were trying to help, and I wasn’t being very grateful.”
“That’s okay. You didn’t say anything that I hadn’t already considered.”
“Either way, I’m sorry.” She swallowed, and he knew immediately that the confession was harder for her to make than she let on. How do you maintain control when the rules are lying in shreds on the endless white hardpan of some otherworld desert?
“I was wondering if you wanted to have breakfast with me?” she offered. “I’m making pancakes.”
Jack got out of his chair and came around to the stairs. “You found pancake mix?”
“It was behind the bar, just like you said.”
He started down the stairs, already able to smell the tantalizing aroma. He followed her to the bar where butter sizzled on an electric skillet, and the coffee in the urn smelled like Irish cream. They sat beside each other on the barstools, Ellen pouring and flipping pancakes while she ate, much to Jack’s amazement. Sometimes she would turn the pancakes over without even looking away from him, listening to him tell her a little about himself, or the Saloon, or whatever he was saying. Once or twice he found himself so amazed by watching her that he actually lost his train of thought. He told her all about the last few days, what happened at his job, meeting the Writer, leaving everything behind and coming here. By the time he finished, they had both run out of room, two extra pancakes left behind uneaten.
“The strangest thing about it is I don’t even know if I want to leave this place,” Jack confessed. “In a lot of ways, it feels right to me, like I belong here, like I’ve lived here for years.”
“Don’t you ever want to go back?” Ellen asked, sipping slowly at her coffee.
Jack thought about it for a moment then asked, “Do you?”
She hesitated so long that he thought she wouldn’t answer. Finally she said, “no, but my story’s complicated.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well mine’s not. And I still like it better here. I can’t explain it, but there’s something about this place. In some ways, it feels like it was made for me.”
“Or you were made for it,” she pointed out.
To this, he had no answer.
Finally she said, “How about you finish my tour?”
They left the dishes behind and went back upstairs. “What’s up the stairway? The one with the sign that says Heaven?”
“It just peters out,” he answered. “The stairs all but disappear by the time you reach the top; I don’t think it’s very secure. If Heaven’s to be found that way, you get there by falling off a four-story drop and breaking your neck.”
She crept up the stair, looking around the corner as it dwindled away into nothing before coming back. “Maybe it’s a metaphor, heaven as an accomplishment; the way is never finished until your death, and then it’s too late to go back. Maybe it was built by an artist and not an architect.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I still wouldn’t trust it.”
Ellen shrugged, and started walking the rooftop on her own, leaving Jack to mull over her observations. She had a clearer grasp on some of this than he did.
“Is that a telescope up there?” Ellen asked, throwing a distracted gesture towards the roof of the small writing room. The tripod-mounted telescope looked like an antique even from here. Jack remembered seeing it the other morning, but had forgotten about it amidst the distraction of the phone call from the Writer. And after that, he’d lost interest.
They used the ladder near the bookcase to climb into the rafters and reach the trapdoor, dry hinges protesting as they pushed open the door and climbed up on the widow’s walk. In all directions, for as far as the eye could see, there was nothing. A line of endless steel rails stretched from one horizon to the other, from the limitless hardpan out across the bottomless chasm. The land was as endless and empty as the sky. If infinity was a place, if it could take a form, this was it.
Ellen looked through the eyepiece of the telescope, scanning the white wasteland. “There isn’t anything out there, right? Nothing at all?”
“I suppose there might be something,” Jack said, looking about. In one corner of the low iron railing was a metal brace trailing a copper wire down over the shingles; for a lightning rod most likely, though he had difficulty imaging a thunderstorm in this desert. “The Writer mentioned others; he called them Cast Outs, the Tribe of Dust. He said they were dangerous, and they weren’t to be trusted; that they would try to steal the Sanity’s Edge Saloon for themselves.”
“So why’s that your problem?” she asked, trying to focus the telescope on still more distant features of the empty landscape. “It’s real estate; it’s not worth dying over.”
“Maybe this place is,” Jack said. “Everything here is a reflection of our needs and wants. The Writer said that the Saloon was a kind of Nexus, an intersection of power lines that feed through all reality; not just to this universe, but to all universes, all times, all realities. The power here is so malleable that it can be controlled simply by thought. Can you imagine what some people would do for a chance at power like that? What they would do with
power like that? I have a responsibility as the Caretaker to prevent that.”
“How do you know he was telling the truth?” she asked, still distracted by what the telescope was showing her. “This Writer guy, I mean.”
“I don’t,” he conceded. “But he’s been right so far. I may not be able to explain it, but it doesn’t make anything I’ve seen any less true. This is a second chance for me. I have to take it.”
“But you don’t know how it works,” she said.
“What makes you say that?”
Ellen looked up at him. “Wasn’t that what the Writer was supposed to be here for? Wasn’t he supposed to tell you how this place worked?”
Jack looked away at the sand. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Ellen nodded, returning her attention to the telescope. “What do these others look like?” she asked.
“I have no idea. It’s hard to believe anything could survive out there.”
Through the telescope, Ellen saw a flickering speck of movement that would not stay still long enough for her to focus on it. It could easily be nothing, but—
“I think there’s something out there,” she said. “Take a look.”
A sudden, piercing whistle from the distance brought Jack up short, the shrill, jagged noise overwhelming the desert silence. Ellen shaded her eyes, scanning the wasteland for the source, but Jack already knew.
Another train was coming.
MORE GUESTS ARRIVE
The train rammed to a stop like a bullet smashing into an invisible wall, a blast of air sweeping over Ellen and Jack as they stepped out upon the platform, whipping at their hair and clothes. The passenger car door slid open, cool air escaping with a hiss. Then silence.
Jack waited, anticipation and something like disappointment. He didn’t expect another quiet morning of pancakes with Ellen for a long time; maybe never. The train was here; more guests were arriving. Their time alone together was over. He told himself it was safer this way.
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 15
