A man stood in the open door wearing a dark gray suit, a viridian tie that screamed to his sense of power, and shoes that would have cost Jack a month’s pay—when he was still paid. He had the robust look of a middle-aged man far from the middle of his life—at least in his own mind—and the wherewithal to support that belief, a look that typified a CEO, a power banker, or corporate lawyer with a tight, masculine face and a strong physique aggressively maintained for the sole purpose of intimidation. He scanned them and the saloon, affording neither any more time than the other, then squared his shoulders, pulled a cell phone from his coat, and started thumbing keys.
“Um, hi,” Jack said.
The man ignored him, holding up the phone and turning first one way then the next. “No cell service. Or are you jamming the signal?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Look, I don’t have all day. Is this a money grab?” The man’s eyes shifted from side to side as if looking for someone else.
“A what?” Jack asked.
“Money? Comprendé? You abducted me for money, right? So let’s get down to business. What do you want?”
When Jack didn’t immediately respond, the man shook his head and turned to Ellen. “So what about you, cupcake? Sprechen de English? What do your people want?”
“My people don’t want anything from you,” Ellen stated flatly.
“We didn’t kidnap you,” Jack said, trying to sound reasonable. “You’re stuck here like the rest of us.”
“Wrong on two counts,” the businessman said. “One, I didn’t come here on my own, so I was kidnapped, and two, I’m nothing like you. If you don’t know what’s going on, point me to someone who does and stop wasting my time. And if you have any pull with whatever towel-head warlord, devil-worshipping cult, or two-bit greenmailing gang of fuckheads you toady for, you better use it because when they find me—and make no mistake, people will find me—I’ll make it my personal mission in life to see both of you fast-tracked to death row. Are we clear? I have a meeting in New York at one—” He made a show of rolling his wrist to display a Rolex, then scowled, tapping furiously at the crystal, the hands motionless. “Dammit!”
“I don’t think you understand,” Jack said.
“Oh, I understand,” the man countered, looking again to his cell phone. And again, a look of perplexity. “How can the battery be dead? It was fine thirty seconds ago.”
“Who are you?” Ellen asked.
“Leland Quince. That you don’t know that is how I know you’re too stupid to be the brains behind this operation. Now be good little minions, and point me to the one who is.”
“Leland, listen—”
Leland Quince held up a finger, stopping Jack mid-sentence. “Are we old friends, school buddies, relatives? No. You’re just a pair of flunkies. Call me Mr. Quince, or call me sir.”
“Mr. Quince, we’re not kidnappers,” Jack said firmly. “This isn’t a terrorist plot or an attempt at blackmail. Whatever you were doing before you got here, I don’t know, and right now I don’t even care. My name’s Jack. I’m the caretaker here.”
“So I’m free to go, is that it, Jack?” Mr. Quince challenged.
“Be my guest.”
“If you’re just a caretaker, explain to me how I got here,” Leland Quince said. “I was on board a plane, Flight 7401 out of Chicago, aisle seat, first class, nonstop to LaGuardia. How did I end up on a train in the middle of a desert at an abandoned whistle stop? Explain that.” His head tipped to one side, a maddening expression on his face as he awaited answers he knew Jack didn’t have.
“Mr. Quince,” Jack said, now simply annoyed. “I don’t know how you got here any more than I know how we got here. Ellen arrived on the train this morning. I arrived yesterday.”
“But you just said you were the caretaker,” the businessman countered.
“It’s my second day on the job.”
“Right,” Leland said. “And where exactly are we?”
“The Sanity’s Edge Saloon,” Jack said, adding “It’s not on the same line of reality as any of us are used to.”
The businessman’s expression changed to the spent look of someone realizing he is deep in conversation with a person now revealed to be completely and unequivocally insane. His face tightened, a grimace of impotent rage as he realized all of his effort and time had been wasted, pearls before swine.
“Are you gonna stand there all day?” a voice from inside the car asked. “Some of us want to get off.”
Leland Quince’s face darkened, an angry vein standing out from his neck and along his temple. He whirled back on the speaker. “Get off?” he shrieked. “Do you have the slightest idea what’s happening here!”
“No, but neither do you, so what’s the difference?” A young man stepped out on the platform, jeans faded and frayed, spattered with paint and blown out at the knees. He wore high-top sneakers and a black T-shirt with a rock band logo Jack didn’t recognize. His hair was sun-lightened and raggedly cut, skin golden-brown over a wiry frame. He looked at the others on the platform then up at the sky. “Damn, it’s gonna be a hot one today. I’m Alex.”
Jack extended a hand, and Alex shook it. “I’m Jack. This is Ellen.”
“I’m guessing neither of you are kidnappers.”
Jack nodded. Quince, arms folded, frowned and shook his head.
“Good,” Alex said. “Cuz you weren’t gonna get anything for me.”
“This isn’t about you,” Quince snapped. “You’re incidental; bycatch. Now shut up and let me take care of this.” Leland turned to Jack. “I need to make some calls, let people know where I am. They’ll be looking for me by now.”
“I don’t think anyone will find you here,” Ellen said quietly.
“I don’t think you know who you’re dealing with,” Leland shot back. “Now let me make a call, and I’m sure we can reach some kind of accord.”
Jack had the impression that Leland Quince had never before heard the word no in regards to anything he wanted. In his world, everything could be bought, bullied or negotiated. He reminded Jack of one of the CEO’s of Stone Surety’s parent company. While touring the facility—before anyone knew of their intent to sell off and close down the company—his boss introduced the CEO to Jack as they passed his cubical. Jack extended his hand and the man looked at it the way one might look at an old cobweb, or a bug on the sidewalk. Then he walked away, a gaggle of executives in tow. In Leland Quince’s world, some people mattered—himself—and some people did not—everyone else.
“There is no phone,” Jack said quietly. “No radio. No television. No newspapers. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon does not subscribe to reality the way you think. No cell phones. No cars. No planes. No stocks or banks, no policeman or taxis. This place is all there is, and we’re the only ones in it.”
“Bullshit!”
“Look around if you don’t believe me,” Jack said, only just beginning to appreciate how easy a time he had had of convincing Ellen Monroe. “If we kidnapped you, Mr. Quince, we’re sorry. Call the authorities and have us locked up. Feel free to go wherever you want, do whatever you wish. Go ahead. I can’t stop you. No one can because there’s no one around. The entire population for as far as the eye can see is standing right here on this platform.”
And from inside the train, a little girl of seven or eight was staring around the corner of the door at the group on the platform. “Hi.”
“Hey, Lindsay,” Alex said, squatting down eye-level with the little girl. “It’s okay to come out. Everybody, this is Lindsay. Lindsay, everybody.”
She nodded and stepped forward, a stick-waif with coltish limbs and an unruly mop of long, curly hair pulled back by a ball cap with an Animaniac’s logo on the brim.
And the moment her feet cleared the doorway, it slammed shut behind her, the train bursting forward as if fired from a cannon. It flew out across the edge like a streak of ball lightning arcing the sky; a flash of brilliance, then gone.
Ja
ck stared at the empty space where the train once stood. “I suppose I should have expected that.”
* * *
“What’s going on here?” the businessman asked, voice so low that Jack wondered if he actually intended to speak at all. He was staring across the emptiness, truly seeing it for the first time. “And when’s the train coming back?
“I honestly don’t know,” Jack answered, staring down the gleaming rails as they soared away across the emptiness of the abyss, converged to a single line far in the distance, and finally disappeared from sight. Of the train, there was no sign; the only proof to its existence, three passengers left behind. “My guess would be when it comes to take us home.”
“And … and when is that?” Leland Quince asked.
“I don’t know that either. But there are five return tickets, and now there are five of us. My guess is that everyone who’s coming is already here. Now all I have to do is find a way to get us back home.”
“Yeah, well this place looks better than the dump I came from,” Alex said. “I spent my life trying to get out of that shithole, so take your time.”
Surprised, Jack asked. “Are you saying you don’t want to go back?”
“Hell, no!” Alex replied, pacing the edge of the platform, eyes on his feet as if walking a tightrope. “What’s there for me to go back to? I work for a housepainter in the valley, get shit for pay. I got enough money to rent a shoebox with a foldaway bed and a bathroom with bad water pressure. As far as I’m concerned, that train ride was just fortune’s way of telling me it’s finally my time.”
“I don’t think I want to go back either,” Lindsay said softly.
“Yeah?” Alex asked. “And why’s that, kiddo?”
“I … I just don’t.”
The young man stopped and looked at her. “Won’t you miss you mom and dad?”
But Lindsay was shaking her head. “I don’t … I don’t think they’re looking for me anymore.”
“What do you mean?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know. I just don’t think they are.”
“Christ!” Leland grumbled, staring out across the great wasteland.
The Writer never said what to do if some of his charges didn’t want to go back. All he said was that Jack was supposed to write them new lives. What if they didn’t want to go? He had little enough reason to go back, and guessed Ellen probably felt the same way, but Alex and Lindsay, too. Only Leland Quince seemed eager to get back, eager to pass through the looking-glass of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon and take a second chance.
“Lindsay,” Jack said, crouching down awkwardly and extending his hand. “I’m Jack.”
She shook the offered hand, a child’s handshake unaccustomed to the adult ritual. “Hi.”
“Lindsay, what do you mean, you don’t think your parent’s are looking for you anymore?” It was an awkward question, tactlessly phrased. Her blank stare told him so. “What, … I mean, can you tell me the last thing you remember before being on the train?”
She shook her head. “I don’t remember anything from before … except for the trees. They’re all around me. I’m in the woods, I guess. I’m lying on the ground looking up at the trees, and they’re everywhere. Nothing’s moving. I’m just lying there. But I don’t remember anything before that. When I try to remember my mom and dad, I can’t see them.” Her eyes were wide, her face empty as she stared inward, entranced. “Their faces are all blurry. I don’t remember anything else besides the trees. It’s like they’re looking down at me.”
“That’s okay, forget it,” Jack said. He reached out and patted her arm, the gesture startling her, her gaze coming back into focus as if from some place far away. “If you don’t want to go back, you don’t have to. You can stay here as long as you like.”
Jack knew he’d probably lied to her. If he understood the Writer’s instructions and what his job as the Caretaker entailed, the one thing he could not do was let her stay. But would he be able to send her somewhere else? That was the part the Writer had not explained. Could he actually change their lives, or was he merely finishing what was already begun? Audience polls will determine how tonight’s story ends. He thought about the ticket files on the computer, the picture of the clearing in the trees like Lindsay’s description. And Cross-Over Station. The padded walls of an asylum. A first-class cabin aboard an airplane. And a chalk outline in a concrete water conduit in a sun-blistered city. Perhaps a city in the valley.
Jack glanced at Alex, wondering if the young man might have nothing waiting back in the real world for him, either. Not the nothing he spoke so glibly about, dissatisfied and directionless, but the literal nothing; the nothing of a satin-lined casket and six feet of packed earth. Maybe the Saloon was more than a second chance at a failed life. Maybe it was actually a second chance at life altogether.
“I have a meeting to get to,” Leland insisted obstinately. “People depend on me. Whatever you have to do in order to get me back there, you do it. After that, you can all do whatever you like. Stay here, set up a hippie commune, discuss your innermost fears in group sessions and sing campfire songs. I don’t care. Just tell me when the next train is due.”
“That’s difficult to say,” Jack said.
Leland, arms crossed, head forward, offered Jack the same withering stare of the CEO from Stone Surety, the resemblance disarming. “Try.”
“I have five return tickets,” Jack said after a moment. “I need to complete them. Once they’re ready, the train will come back and pick us up.”
“What do you mean you have to complete them?” Mr. Quince asked.
“Reality here is … flexible. In order to complete the tickets, I need to write out how the stories end. When I’m done, the train will come back and take us home.”
You hope.
The others were staring at him, Ellen included, her expression doubtful. It was the most generous afforded to him.
Leland Quince spoke for the group. “You’re a lunatic.”
“Maybe,” Jack responded. “You asked what I know. I told you.”
“Do you expect any of us to buy that load of crap?” Leland demanded.
“I don’t expect anything,” Jack replied. “I’m simply telling you what I was told.” Well, most of it anyway. “What you now know is the extent of what I know about this place.” Also untrue, but telling them more wouldn’t help his case.
“That’s out there, man,” Alex admonished.
“Jack?”
He looked down at Lindsay. “What?”
“If you’re writing my story, can I have a dog?”
He hadn’t expected support from a seven-year-old girl, but who else would believe an explanation like his except lunatics, children, and those still of a mind to believe. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Listen, Jack,” Alex said. “I appreciate someone who’s been dealt a bad hand looking for a little bit more in life, but Jesus! Mr. Quince is right. What you’re talking about doesn’t even make sense.”
“It’s just the way things were explained to me. There are five return tickets and five of us. Each ticket is one person’s way back to reality. We’ve all been brought here from various places. As far as I know, those chapters are done. I was selected as the one who would design our new realities, the new lives we’ll each step into as completely as if we were born to them. Don’t ask me how it works. I don’t know. I just know what I’ve been told.”
But there were so many things the Writer never told him. How much leeway would he have? Would the Saloon teach him, or simply punish his mistakes? Was he godlike, or was he the whipped minstrel composing for the amusement of the Nexus that would, if it deemed his work satisfactory, print the tickets that would give them back their lives? Was the Saloon a way station for stories in progress then, an old backyard shed for the cast-off characters and unclean pieces with no place to be, no story—no reality! —to inhabit? And was he merely a hack looking for the imagined nod of approval from a madman’s wes
tern saloon?
Maybe Leland Quince was right after all. Maybe he was a lunatic.
“If you think I’m buying this for one second, you are sadly mistaken,” Leland said, poking Jack sharply in the chest. “You may entertain notions of us kowtowing before you, but I see through your bullshit, Jack. You’re an ignorant fraud. None of this is real. You’re either a criminal or a moron, and I don’t have time for either one.”
“If you can’t see that this place is nothing like anyplace you’ve ever known,” Ellen said, “then you’re the moron.”
“Sweetheart, as far as I’m concerned, you two were in this together from the start. Nothing you say is of any concern to me.”
“She’s right, though,” Alex said.
“Shut up!”
“He’s just scared like the rest of us,” Lindsay said softly.
Jack knew that she was right, seeing through the businessman’s deliberate masks to a thing that only she, as a child, could still understand: naked fear. Adults were too practiced at denying it, at concealing their own and politely dismissing it in others for the sake of etiquette. But a child would know only too well that the world was filled with things to be feared; things unknown and more terrifying for it. Leland Quince, captain of industry, power mogul and business magnate, was in way over his head and only just beginning to realize it. And he was fighting the rising panic the only way he knew how, the way he overcame any obstacle: by attacking it.
But that same child’s innocence came without the wisdom to know the dangers in exposing another’s weakness.
Leland glared at her, his face flushed, looking as if he might actually throttle the small girl dead on the spot. His voice came in a tight whisper. “None of you understand a goddamn thing.”
Stepping off the platform, he scanned the length of the tracks, gazing upon the wasteland. “There’s another way out of here. If there’s one thing I know, there’s always another way. Ninety-nine percent of the world does everything the hard way, but not me. I do things my way. I always have and I always will. A real man makes his own path. Now I’m going to find the way out of this place, and if any of you are smart, you’ll come with me and do exactly as I say.”
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 16
