It sounded like the meddling hand of fate, and frankly, he liked to keep his affairs well clear of that meddlesome bitch.
But fate could be clever, sometimes. She could wheedle her way inside your head, and make you think it was your own idea. She was cunning, that one.
And maybe she had eyes that were a little winsome.
And nothing had been the same since.
Dabble crossed to a narrow alcove with a nondescript door; wood panels painted several times over, cracks revealing the colors of underlying layers. Behind the door, a stairway leading both up and down. He walked up to the second floor, unfolding the title page as he went. He did not worry about leaving the shop unattended. He would not be gone long, and no one ever stole from Nicholas Dabble. Some rules did not need to be explained. You did not stare at the sun, you did not swallow liquid bleach, you did not perform fellatio on a .38 unless you really meant to kill yourself, and you did not cross Nicholas Dabble.
For himself, he was quite comfortable with his relationship with this reality.
The second floor of Dabble’s Books was, room by room, a contradiction. Some were empty, minimalism to the nth degree, the plaster stripped away to reveal bare lath, a substructure of wires and braces and plumbing, the only design the flowered pattern of water damage; faded roses colored in rust and gray. In these rooms, the floors were naked wood littered with clots of dust, dried husks of long-dead insects, and rodent spoor. But other rooms were the opposite: immaculately finished in oil-rich wood and oriental carpets, furnishings of dark oak and walnut, blood-red leather, sumptuous velvet tapestries. These rooms were appeals to the need for creature comforts, the air fragrant with sweet tobacco, tea waiting to be poured from silver, drunk from cups of bone china, while a decanter of fine, aged brandy waited for that later hour. But the decadence was hidden by books, such that it was all these rooms were: reading rooms. Books of every type and description were shelved from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of space. They were stacked so high on the tables that the wood bowed visibly, the legs straining. The carpets had even sprouted books, erected into crude stumps without rhyme or reason like nature’s ironic vengeance: you can’t cut down books to make trees. But there was nothing else. Austere privation or cluttered opulence, the only possession Nicholas Dabble kept was books.
Books were like people, and he liked to collect them.
Dabble moved from one room to the next, each time pausing and staring at the page he had stolen from Ellen Monroe’s book, the title page of The Sanity’s Edge Saloon. He considered it in each room, working the page over and over in his mind, trying to find the pigeonhole that eluded him; the one that would allow him to file this away and let it be forgotten, instead of becoming an obsession. And with each empty endeavor, each failed attempt at understanding, he would move on to the next room.
And the next room.
And the next room.
But always he found nothing, the book a mystery just like Ellen Monroe. And that concerned him. He was not the only one who distrusted mysteries, who found them fascinating and frightening and obsessive. But where Dabble found the inexplicable a challenge to be unraveled, a prize to be coveted for its rare experience, others were not so easily enamored.
No, not by a long stretch.
He found himself back at the stairs down to his shop, having circled all the rooms, each in turn, and drawing upon their unique influences, their richness or paucity.
But still he had nothing.
The universe did not tolerate mysteries. Mankind survived in perpetual ignorance of itself and the universe, scraping the surface by the light of a candle stub, convinced of its mastery for the bits it unearthed, deluded into the myth of its own superiority by the too-obvious conclusions it reached about what was always there. But it knew nothing, not even the extent of its own ignorance. One ape rolls a stone down a hill and calls it a wheel, and suddenly they’re indomitable.
The universe had a sense of humor.
God might have been better served giving hands to dolphins, and leaving the simians chattering at one another in the trees where they belonged, flinging shit at the face of the moon and howling at the jaguar that circled below.
Hindsight was twenty-twenty, how well he knew.
But the universe knew all. There weren’t realms to be explored or boundaries to be stretched. Reality encompassed all, stretching everything to it limits long ago by virtue of its definition. No mysteries. No riddles. Simply things in hiding that, if you circled wide enough and long enough, would be revealed. The universe was not unbounded possibilities, but a finely crafted, intricately interconnected piece of clockwork; a vast, godlike machine.
Only something soft had caught itself in the gears. The cuckoo had slipped down into the guts of the clock. Or maybe she was a sparrow. He wasn’t sure and supposed it didn’t matter anyway; she would be ground apart for her misstep.
But reality would not survive; not unchanged, not uncorrupted. The finely crafted, intricately interconnected clockwork would rip itself apart trying to grind through this hapless interloper.
And he really did like this reality.
It seemed a waste to kill her, and maybe an impossibility as well—he did like Ellen Monroe very much—but what of his reality if he didn’t?
Maybe she could be contained?
Questions, but no answers. Whatever else, he would have to hide her until he decided. Others would be coming for her, others with no qualms about the disposition of his Ellen, for good or ill.
Clockwork be damned, some simply could not abide a conundrum.
He returned to his shop by way of the darkened stairway, crumpling the title page of The Sanity’s Edge Saloon into a tight ball, and swallowing it whole. It would give him dreams; maybe they would tell him something.
Even in Hell, the devil knows hope.
THE GOOD DOCTOR
Dr. Frederick Kohler’s second floor office overlooked the corner bus stop.
He never realized this before; had never actually paid much attention to the view. But every Tuesday and Friday afternoon, between patients, he found himself staring out the window, something he had never done before either.
Only since Ellen Monroe.
She was his last appointment of the afternoon, 3:00 PM every Tuesday and Friday, so she could be late if necessary, or he could keep her late if the session warranted.
Ellen was a special case requiring special rules.
She did not come seeking his help; she did not think she needed helping. She was, point of fact, forced to see him as a condition of her release. But she definitely did not want to see him twice a week. That was her father’s idea, and he harbored no illusions as to the man’s motivation. Kohler came well recommended, but more important than his credentials was his location; he was well away from Gabriel Monroe and the circles he traveled. Dr. Kohler would keep Ellen Monroe’s embarrassment from coming back on him, a wise choice of caregiver for the daughter of an aspiring governor, especially when she was a habitual drug-user and a murderer; the charges might have been dismissed—the world was better off less one junkie-pusher rapist—but the fact remained.
Frederick Kohler found Gabriel Monroe offensive to both his professionalism and his sensibility. But he paid the bills, and he left Frederick alone to treat Ellen as he saw fit. Gabrielle Monroe was a patron, he the artist, and Ellen the shapeless lump of clay in need of molding.
He turned from the window, crossed the room to a large fish tank, and tapped the glass with his fingernail. The sound made the occupants go motionless, floating still-life in their weightless world, expectant. A natural response. He took a pinch of food, rubbing the papery flakes between his fingers and crushing them over the water’s surface. The fish came immediately. Tap the glass, food arrives; Pavlovian conditioning. Manna from heaven, he thought. This is what it must feel like to be God.
Like many of his patients, Ellen liked looking at the fish. She seemed fascinated by them. For himself,
they held no interest, but he kept them for the sake of his patients, much as he displayed the nondescript art prints and family photos. When his patients saw them, they relaxed; they related; they confessed. That was why he kept them. It was strictly professional.
Of late, he had developed a fondness for an angelfish, though. The reason why remained a mystery, but a good psychiatrist understands there are matters beyond his ken.
Ellen, for instance, had lost her mind.
He did not use the expression carelessly, not some exaggerated hyperbole. She had, in a very real sense, lost her mind. More aptly, she had locked a part of it away, closed the door and discarded the key. There was a past there, of course. Any speculation to the contrary was nonsense. But for one reason or another, she had closed that entire past off and started over as if she were a character in a book, her life beginning with page one and going forward from there, her past only an assumption without any basis in fact. Nonsense. Likely trauma induced, one too many times being revived in an ER. One too many times riding down her highs in county lock-up. And most recently, killing her would-be rapist in a drugged stupor before passing out. The police found her, half-naked and unconscious beside his dead body. Later in the hospital, a misguided regimen by his esteemed—amend that to bungling—colleague, Dr. Samuel Chaulmers, not only reinforced her withdrawal from reality, but supplanted her past entirely with a delusional fantasy world. Gabriel Monroe brought her to him upon her conditional release because the only thing more damaging politically than a mentally ill, drug-addicted family member was hiding that mentally ill, drug-addicted family member away in an asylum.
The doctor crossed back to the window, looked out. The sidewalk in front of the bus stop was still empty.
To be fair, Chaulmers was not a complete imbecile; he was just old school. He diagnosed Ellen’s habitual use of hallucinogens as a sign of depression, and saw her lack of response to his own regimen of prescribed medication as a call for something stronger, something more persuasive. Electro-convulsive shock therapy fit the bill nicely. Short-term memory loss was a side-effect, no question; but never long-term. And it should not have induced delusions, her stories of another world, of Jack O. Lantern and the strange cast of fairytale creatures and fractured personalities. Chaulmers’s treatment had sent her true reality deep into hiding, leaving this facsimile behind as a coping mechanism.
Well, he liked a challenge. The world had damaged Ellen Monroe. Intentions aside, Chaulmers managed only to break her a little more. It was now left to him to pick up the pieces and put them back together.
On his desk, a single picture in a cheap department store frame sat turned away from his patients. It was the only one that faced him when he was at his desk. A young girl, early teens, standing in front of a young man in a cap and gown. His arm is draped around her neck, a little playful, a little protective. Both are smiling. His high school graduation, the girl his cousin, Catherine; everyone called her Cassie.
The picture caught his eye as he looked back from the empty window view, the barren sidewalk—where was the bus, anyway? There was something about it, something familiar, déjà vu. Until eight weeks ago, he hadn’t looked at the picture in years. Now it occupied his desk, his attention, his thoughts. Cassie’s eyes, even then, looked far away, even lost.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the bulk of the city bus approaching, heard the rumble of the diesel engine, and let his misgivings slip away unattended.
Because that’s what you do with things you don’t want to remember: you bury them, and try like hell to forget.
JUBJUB BIRD
Jasper Desmond was preparing to fly.
He knew he couldn’t really fly; he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t have wings like planes or birds had wings, so he couldn’t fly. No wings, no feathers, no tail meant you couldn’t fly. Jasper Desmond wasn’t stupid. Gramma said so, and Gramma was never wrong.
Gramma also said he was a good boy. She didn’t like him going up on the roof, and she didn’t like him being out in the rain, but she said he was a good boy. And sometimes Gramma let him go up on the roof anyway, and sometimes she sent him out in the rain for groceries, or to pick up something from Engle’s Drugs. You won’t melt, silly boy, she would tell him. And sure enough, he never had. Gramma was never wrong.
You’re a good boy, Jasper, Gramma would say. So clever with your hands. You just don’t think so good. And Gramma was never wrong. Thinking made his head fill up, and things spilled out. Then he would forget things. And then he would get in trouble.
Forgetting things was what found him at Benway’s salvage yard that afternoon. Had he remembered to tell his grandmother, she would never have allowed it. He wasn’t supposed to go to the junkyard, to trespass inside the fence, to be in that part of town. It was dangerous, all of it, every step of the way.
But if he hadn’t been at Benway’s that afternoon, hadn’t found what he did, just imagine how it would have turned out.
Imagine.
Gramma was watching television, drinking a glass of ginger ale and fanning herself with a magazine. Lord, it’s hot, she would say over and over. And it was. So he said so. Then he said he was going to go ride his bike.
“You mind the traffic. Look both ways before crossing the street, and only ride your bike in the park.”
“Yes, Gramma.”
“And you be back before supper, you hear me?”
“Yes, Gramma.”
“You’re a good boy, Jasper.”
“Yes, Gramma.”
Too many things filling up his head; something always spilled out.
He carried his bike downstairs to the street. Engle’s Drugs was on the way to the park. He would stop and buy a cherry Blowpop; cherry was the best flavor in the world.
Digging in his pocket for change, he found one of the flyers from this morning; flyers he collected off windshields and out of mailboxes from all over the neighborhood. He had taken them up on the roof, folded them into planes and watched them fly. All of the flyers had the same picture, a winged contraption just right for making a person fly. Flights of Fancy, it said. He could read; he wasn’t stupid. And it sure was a fancy flying machine, yes it was. It looked a little like a bird. Birds knew all about flying. He wished he could fly, be a bird. Gramma said that was just make-believe. People couldn’t fly and they couldn’t be birds. That was crazy nonsense, and he wasn’t crazy. Gramma said so.
But an airplane could fly. He could make one like the paper airplanes he’d made, only bigger and more like the picture. Then he could fly. Like the paper airplanes. Like a bird.
He forgot the cherry Blowpop and Engle’s Drugs and even his grandmother’s warning to ride his bike only in the park, and to mind traffic, and be back before supper. He was thinking about building a plane, one like the picture, and where he could find the parts he would need. When he thought too much, something always spilled out.
This was how Jasper Desmond found himself at Benway’s salvage yard that afternoon when his grandmother thought he was riding his bike in the park.
And the world would never be the same.
Jasper leaned his bike against the junkyard fence of rusty, corrugated sheet metal and mildewed plywood slabs wired to the chain-link hiding everything inside from view, and topped with a triple row of barbwire. But Jasper knew the way in. Billy Wicker showed it to him back when Billy Wicker was his friend. He and Billy had gone to school together at first. Then one year, Billy went to a different class. Then a different school. And finally, Jasper and Billy weren’t friends anymore. He asked Gramma why, and she didn’t answer him right away, but gave him a long hug. Then she said, “Because sometimes that’s the way it is.”
But back when they were friends, Billy showed him the place in the fence where the links had been cut and never repaired. The plywood sheet inside could be pushed aside, giving access to a small space hidden by a triple stack of cars, all bent and crushed and rusted nearly through, their pieces folded together until
they fused into one car, tall and malformed and dying. Billy told him that the bums used the hole to get into the junkyard. They snuck in, he said, and fell asleep in the old cars and drank and swore and jerked each other off. Jasper wasn’t sure what that meant, but he laughed when Billy said it because Billy laughed, and Billy Wicker was his friend.
Jasper Desmond walked the edge of the fence until he found the place where the chain link had been peeled back, the flap held open by a twisted coat hanger. He slid the plywood sheet back just the way Billy used to all those years ago when they would sneak in here and drink soda pop straight from the bottle and look for strange treasures in the cast off wreckage. And just like he remembered, it opened a way that he could crawl through, a secret doorway into the heart of the junkyard. The rusted cars were still there: still rusting, still rotting, flaking away in chips and peels. Eventually they would dissolve and become dust, but for now they seemed trapped in a perpetual state of permanent decay.
He took the museum flyer from his pocket, staring at it, concentrating on each aspect of the image, on each line and shape. Sweat beaded upon his forehead and across his neck and back in prickly patches. Clouds skittered across the sun, and the sweat ran down his face to fall upon the paper. And still he concentrated on the image, building a picture in his mind of each and every piece, each exactly like the one in the flyer… only bigger. Then he would build a plane, and it would fly. And it would be big enough to carry him, and he would fly. Gramma said he was clever with his hands, and grandma was never wrong.
He would fly.
He started walking, the paper gripped tightly in front of his face as though wrestling it away from a whirlwind. He talked aloud, unaware. It was why everyone called him jibber jabber—everyone except Gramma. Whenever he tried to think really hard, what came out of his mouth was a discordant string of words, a tossed salad of phrases and ideas that he was unaware of. Jibber jabber.
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 6
