And she was crying, hesitant tears moving down her cheeks.
Oh God, Ellen, what the hell are you doing? she thought dismally. You can’t help Jack understand any of this. You don’t even understand it yourself. What the hell use would Jack have for an ex-junkie Dreamliner, anyway?
She found herself thinking back to the previous morning, to a simple breakfast of pancakes and coffee. To a relaxing soak in a tub after a long sleep that left her strangely refreshed, the morning air crisp and cool, the floor pleasantly solid and refreshing against the soles of her feet. She felt right with the world, then. She remembered talking with Jack; not about anything important or weighty, but somehow she remembered all of it as if it were the secrets of the universe revealed, whispered into her ear by some guardian angel. She remembered it because, over all the years of her life, she could not remember a time when she felt more at ease, more at home within herself. It had all been right for that brief time here in the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, only herself and Jack Lantirn and no one else; no one threatening to destroy them, or making impossible demands on them.
And then it all changed, the ganja god’s paradise lost.
And suddenly, more than any other time before, she desperately wanted to be riding the Dreamline. Riding it forever!
* * *
Jack sat on the rooftop staring up at Ellen atop the stairway and thinking. Originally, he had been at his desk. His desk; the phrase still sounded wrong. He felt like an intruder, a usurper of the Writer’s throne. The Cast Outs were nothing more than local land barons come to challenge the reign of an upstart boy-king pulling tickets from his pocket like unearned titles.
He had typed nearly a page, just an outline of some ideas: a strange knight in a strange land, an amalgam of times where the Medieval and the Old West and the distant future and the Puritanical past all crashed together in a blender. It was a good idea, he thought, but one that was, for the moment, without direction. Just vague ideas and images, substance without form, empty words on a page. Distractions kept pulling him away, some his own fault, some the fault of others; neither changed the fact that he wasn’t getting anything done.
And the clock was ticking.
The Writer said he would have as much time as he needed, but not as much as he wanted, advice not overly helpful. And since the Cast Outs had managed to kill him, a prospect the Writer believed impossible, his information was circumspect.
And as if he didn’t already have enough to deal with, a sixth person arrives at the Saloon. Oversight. He liked her—beautiful, edgy, her candor and grit—but it didn’t change the fact that she didn’t belong here. There were only five tickets out; she made six. So now what? Kick her out? Send her back to the Wasteland? What if he was wrong? If he sent her away—allowing for a moment that such a thing was even possible—she would almost certainly die. He wasn’t willing to make that kind of decision. But at some point, he had to finish the tickets—all five of them. Then what? He would be gone, the other four with him, and Oversight would be left behind. Would Kreiger look after her, punish her, or simply leave her to the Wasteland? Would she or Kreiger even survive? For the Tribe of Dust, he cared not; the welt on the side of his head testified to their disregard for his wellbeing. Jesus might turn the other cheek, but Jack was no messiah, had never applied for the job and absolutely did not want it. They could all rot in the Wasteland, their bones picked clean by insects, their lives forgotten by everyone … and Jack wouldn’t care one bit.
Oversight was another matter.
But such arguments were moot. The tickets weren’t on the verge of being completed. The truth was he had no idea what to do about any of them. Writing was not a switch in his head; there was no on or off for him. He was always imagining, always writing in his mind, and what came, came. And when it didn’t … well, you crossed that bridge when you got to it.
Only here it was, and he had nothing. Just a lot of half-formed characterizations, dialogues without sense or sequence, half-baked and contradictory settings and situations. No sooner did he start to get an idea, but then he thought of Ellen, or Alex, or Lindsay, or even Leland Quince, and like that, the idea was gone. It slipped away that quickly. Then the words turned to garbage, forced and lifeless, flat and dull. He would print up the page, study it a moment with a red pen in hand, and cross out the entire thing. Nothing worth saving. Nothing worth salvaging. Just garbage. His wastebasket was full of them.
They deserved better. Instead, they got him. Just Jack. Jack, the loser. Jack, the nobody. Jack, the one who would get them all killed because he just didn’t get it. Jools was right. He had a way of creating expectations in others that he could not possibly fulfill. He was, to everyone including himself, a disappointment.
And he was all they had.
“She deserves better,” he said softly.
Beside him, Nail nodded absently. Whether or not he was agreeing, or simply nodding to the sound of Jack’s voice, he didn’t know. But the gargoyle seemed to be looking at Ellen. Her back to them, she was unaware they were watching over her, and Jack wanted it to stay that way … for a little longer, anyway.
He turned to Nail, then back to Ellen. “What do you see?” he asked softly.
Nail turned, offering Jack a blank stare; curiosity, but not comprehension.
“Do me a favor, huh?” Jack said, his voice so low that only the gargoyle would hear. “If anything happens, no matter what, look after her. I know you’re not really supposed to. I know you’re supposed to protect the Nexus, or the Caretaker, or something like that. But protect her.”
Nail’s mouth opened slightly, the tip of his tongue protruding like a dog’s. For a moment, Jack thought he saw actual understanding behind the liquid black of Nail’s eyes, the message—perhaps not the words, but certainly their intent—making it through: copy that, Houston; message received.
“You understand me, don’t you?”
Nail turned away, staring back up at Ellen, his expression unchanged.
Then again, Jack thought sourly, maybe I’m just losing my mind.
So what else is new?
* * *
The group had splintered since the incident with the disappearing gumball machine. Alex wasn’t exactly sure why, or what happened, or even why it should matter so much. Maybe it was what they called a watershed event. Maybe it wasn’t even the event itself, but the culmination of several things that climaxed in, of all things, the disappearance of something that shouldn’t have mattered in the first place. And from that event, a thousand possible outcomes were pouring down.
He hadn’t made much headway in understanding it, either.
They didn’t eat lunch together. Nor dinner either. As someone became hungry, they simply drifted to the candy machine or the bar, a handful of coins in their hand from the large pickle jar. They would find something to eat then drift away again like ghosts in an old hotel.
Alex tried to keep an eye on both Oversight and Lindsay. The little girl seemed to regard him as a big brother. And she was smart; a hell of lot smarter than he was at seven—almost eight, she probably would have corrected. He made sure she wasn’t overlooked. And as for Mr. Quince, he did his own thing, and Alex didn’t particularly care to find out what that was. Ellen and Jack passed occasionally through the Saloon. He thought Jack was spending his time upstairs writing, which was good news. If their getting out of here hinged upon his writing, well then, more power to him. Of Ellen, he didn’t know. She would disappear for a while, then reappear, moving like a wraith, light of foot, a little pale and a little out of touch with the reality around her. She looked sick … or in withdrawal.
Well, not his place to judge. Not her. Not Jack. Not any of them.
Evening came, the darkness spreading across the Wasteland, sand and sky turning to black. All day, Alex had been unable to get the business mogul’s offer out of his mind. There was something almost right about it, an element of common sense and expediency that ran like a thread through Mr. Quince’s c
arefully woven tale. And that scared him. At exactly what point did Judas decide that betraying Jesus was the best course of action?
And Leland might be right. Only Jack was here by choice. The rest of them were poker chips in a game that Jack, the current Caretaker, and the Tribe of Dust, failed former Caretakers, were playing. Did any of them matter to Jack or Kreiger, or were they simply a means to an end: control over the Nexus and the godhood that position promised. What did he owe Jack, really? Alex liked a lot of people, but he wouldn’t necessarily trust them with his life, or trust them to do what was right instead of what was easiest. Maybe Mr. Quince was right. Maybe Jack wasn’t the man for the job. He seemed to want to go home just like the rest of them, and that meant that he was planning to use one of the five tickets for himself. Why not? But there were six of them now. Someone would be left behind, and Jack would be the one to choose. The rules of the Nexus—so far as anyone understood them—seemed to indicate that Jack could only succeed in sending them back if he used all the tickets. Just two or three or four wasn’t enough. It was all or nothing. But there were only five tickets, not six. All or nothing.
All or nothing.
Oversight alluded that none of the realities created by the tickets would be permanent if any were incomplete. She pressed him for more about Louisiana and the bayou, and he told her what else he remembered. Precious little as it turned out, but she liked to hear him talk about it. She told him that back when Kreiger first tried to control the Nexus, he sent her to a place like what he described. But something happened. Kreiger failed. Her world was undone and she was dragged back to the Wasteland where she had been ever since. She had not offered details, but her point seemed to be that Kreiger’s failure had become hers. He was her master; she shared his fate.
If Jack failed, would they share his fate? Would they be cast out like him? The very idea made his blood run cold. For all it lacked, the Saloon was heaven compared to what lay outside of its shelter.
The small waiting room was all shadows, lit only by the flickering candy machine, and the plum-colored shaft of failing day. Memories of daylight. In this twilight, you could look out at the quiet desert and almost believe that a person could survive out there in the Wasteland for a time. Not forever, no, but perhaps for a time.
Out in the main room, a song started up on the jukebox. Far Behind by a post-grunge alternative band, Candlebox; Jack’s taste in music was out-of-date.
Oversight appeared in the doorway. “Something to drink?” she asked, a bottle of beer extended out to him.
“God, yes,” he answered. It was ice-cold, the glass slippery in his fingers. Back in the real world—the other real world—he would have been denied this simple pleasure. Underage. In that respect, the Saloon wasn’t all that bad. “You have no idea how much I wanted one of these earlier. I couldn’t find one anywhere.”
“The Nexus is capricious in what it metes out,” she answered, sitting down on the opposite side of the bench from him, one leg drawn up, her foot resting between them. “Only the Caretaker gets what he wants all the time, and then only when he knows precisely what he wants. The rest of us are not so lucky.”
“Where are the others?” He had been lost in thought so long that he hadn’t realized the rest of the Saloon had lapsed into a thick silence only partially concealed by the music from the jukebox. Oversight was the first person he’d seen in half an hour.
“Jack’s in his room. Lindsay started to drop off an hour ago. Ellen finally offered to take her upstairs and get her ready for bed. I haven’t seen either of them since. Quince is in his room, also.”
Alex knew about Leland. He’d made it a point to keep track of the businessman since their earlier conversation, his mistrust well-deserved. He saw the businessman heading upstairs an hour ago with a book scrounged from one of the Saloon’s many bookshelves. The Art of War. Alex hadn’t realized that Mr. Quince was a military buff, but it kind of made sense; the man certainly liked winning. “So it’s just you and me.”
He had intended the remark to sound lighthearted, a joke to ease his nervousness. It failed. It was impossible for him to look at Oversight without feeling something, a kind of blind passion, directionless and desperate. And as he felt its pulse like lifeblood surging through his heart, he found it impossible not to hear Mr. Quince’s remark come back to haunt him, reminding him of how Oversight, the object of this desperate, aching want, was owned—owned the way you owned a vintage automobile or a well-trained dog—by Kreiger. It was an outrage! She deserved better. They all did. To argue anything less was to imply they were all simply markers in a game of high stakes poker.
“What’s wrong, Alex?”
“Huh?”
“I can see your face in the dark. You’re thinking something. Not something good, either.”
“It’s nothing,” he lied, and quickly raised the bottle to his lips to cover it. The beer tasted good; unbelievably so. But not good enough to hide his discomfort at being so easily read. “Really, it’s nothing.”
She shrugged, and he knew she didn’t believe him, which was doubly frustrating.
“I’m surprised you’re still awake,” he said, hoping to redirect the conversation. “I would have thought that Lindsay would have worn you out, too.”
“I don’t usually sleep at night,” she said. “Dregs hunt under cover of darkness.”
“I think you’ll be safe here.”
She looked over at him, and he saw the shadows rippling across her face from the flickering candy machine, the mottled camouflage of a tiger hidden in the tall grass. “Habits are a hard thing to break.”
If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn that it was a form of apology. In the main room, the song ended and, after a short pause, started back up again. He looked over his shoulder at the orange and green glow of the Wurlitzer, a corner visible from where he sat. Bubbles floated up through tubes in its frame. “Like this song?” he asked.
“Before today, I had never actually heard music. I like it.”
How much of his world he had taken for granted, small things dismissed as inconsequential, distractions. But it was different here. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon existed in a perfect absence of clutter and trivialities. No calls to make, no taxes to file, no retirement to provide for, or sugar substitutes to worry about, or radio promotions to call in on. Nothing. And outside of the Saloon, the word nothing gained an even purer definition. No music. Nothing to read. Nowhere to go or be. Nothing to look at but the endless white sand and the endless blue sky.
Alex shook his head. “How is it that you didn’t go mad out there after all this time?”
“What makes you think I didn’t?”
He looked over at her, her face a secret of shadows. The plum color was gone from the sky, only blackness left behind with faint touches of Wurlitzer orange and electric green making Oversight’s features unreadable. He couldn’t tell if she was teasing or not.
The song ended then started over again. How many times had she set this same song to repeat? he wondered.
“It eventually happens to everyone who spends too much time inside of their own mind,” she remarked. “The only question is whether you can control your own madness, or whether it will control you.”
He nodded absently, sipping at his beer though he wasn’t really thirsty. Just an excuse not to look at her expression, afraid of what he would find there.
For a few minutes, neither of them said anything. The song ended then started up again. To Alex, it seemed like he was stuck in some kind of loop, something from an old episode of The Twilight Zone or Star Trek, events folding back upon themselves, those inside doomed to repeat their activities forever, eternity spent trapped in the cycle of a single, unchanging moment.
“If this was your last day to live, what would you do?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“One of us won’t be leaving here. You understand that. So, if this was your last day to live, what would you do?”<
br />
A typical question for a late night bull session: if money was no object, what would you do? If you had one day to live, how would you spend it? Answers were predictable: sex with a supermodel, a day of gross opulence, vengeance on anyone who ever wronged you. Sometimes, someone would actually give an answer that was elaborate and detailed, as though the person had been working upon it all of his life, polishing it the way an oyster polishes a pearl until the moment it is revealed, a thing of true brilliance and beauty. But this wasn’t a game. There was nothing hypothetical about her question. One of us won’t get out of here. One of us will stay trapped here forever, and that forever will be brutally short because “here” does not forgive. This is not a game.
“I … I don’t know.”
He felt her hand cover his in the darkness, her skin warm, smooth. “No?”
He shook his head. “No. I never really thought about it. It wasn’t really a question that had any meaning before.” He tried not to look at her directly, afraid he might reveal the burning he felt simply at the touch of her hand.
“It always has meaning. Every second of every minute of every day of your life is just a postponement of the end. There’s no guarantee that the sun will rise, or that you will see it. You could live another eighty years, or die in eighty seconds, so you have to live every moment as if it was the moment before the end.”
“What would you do?” he asked angrily. When you could throw a stone off the edge of madness, you should be beyond the point of recrimination for failing to take your future seriously.
“Experience everything.”
She said it with such complete seriousness that he nearly laughed. Here he thought she expected some elaborate plan: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or enlightenment with the Dalai Lama. Instead, her answer amounted to sex with a super model, or performing on Broadway. Maybe even less defined.
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 26
