Jack found himself on an unfamiliar street in the dreaming plane, walking towards a small shop he had never seen before except in his imagination. He opened the door and walked inside, the feeling of Novocain numbness, a watcher through someone else’s eyes. He saw his fingers grab the door handle, but could not feel it. He saw himself walk across the floor, but could not sense the ground beneath his feet.
I’m dreaming, he thought, then, No, but something very much like it.
He went to the empty counter and reached behind it, feeling for the book that was on the shelf under the register. He knew it was there; how, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps the same way he knew that it wasn’t in the mailbox back in the Wasteland, back where his body lay in an exhausted stupor in a metal can on the edge of madness and dreams. He took out the book and retrieved a pen from beside the register, quickly writing something on the last page. He wasn’t sure what he wrote, the words moving and slipping on the page. Then he turned and left. No explanation. No reason. Just a kind of vague instinct, an actor in a play carrying out lines without context, creating a scene he knew nothing about. Someone called after him, but he did not stop. He crossed the road and turned, waiting on the edge of the curb like a man waiting for a train.
And the train came and he got on board. And everything dissolved into darkness that opened back upon the Wasteland.
It was only a dream. But before it ended, he had stolen a single glimpse of Ellen Monroe.
She was there just like he hoped she would be; the stubborn look of resolve on her face, a mix of confusion and certainty, fear and hope, a paradox. He loved that about her. He took with him her narrow waist and the glimpse of her legs below her skirt, the long hair that she did not work at, but was somehow always beautiful, the plant of her feet, the delicate splay of her fingers. Ellen!
He lay in the slanted sunlight allowed through the portholes of his technorganic dwelling. Wind chimes rang gently on the ethereal wind from the dream realm beyond the edge of sanity and reason. He could smell coffee brewing, the aroma laced with hazelnuts, nutmeg and the dust of the Wasteland. He had tasted the last once before when he’d tasted Oversight’s blood; enlightenment, revelation, understanding and madness in equal measure. Weird, wild mojo. But this was only coffee. A single mug waited for him, already poured, steam wafting off the surface in the new day’s light. It sat beside a bowl of cooling cream of mushroom soup; not his first choice for breakfast, but he hadn’t eaten since the night before last and was in no mood to argue the menu. He wolfed it down with two cups of the coffee while staring out the open metal door at the distant tracks, the rising sun revealing their condition: rusted and fallen to disrepair.
The tracks would never be the same again, but that was okay. It was an old convention; its time had passed.
Sitting outside on the sand, a curious looking animal’s skull, the mouth gaping at him, the lower jaw replaced with a rudimentary keyboard, keys like rows of teeth. A re-creation of his laptop, he supposed. The Jabberwock. Very Naked Lunch.
The idea amused him and he laughed. But in the vast emptiness of the desert, the sound rang hollow, making him stop self-consciously.
Once upon a time in a life very distant and removed from now, the Writer told him that the Saloon—the Nexus—would provide him with anything he needed. Not wanted, but needed. Jack needed to write so he could control the Nexus, control the madness.
He scrounged the wreckage until he found an old orange crate to set his new typewriter on, and sat down before it in the doorway of his modest dwelling, a cup of coffee in easy reach. And he stared at the empty page, the empty Wasteland, the empty sky.
And very slowly, Jack Lantirn began to write.
All of this was before.
THE EDGE OF MADNESS CAFÉ
The typewriter was gone.
Jack was the Caretaker. He understood what that meant now. The skull-typewriter was the beginning—the foundation from which Ellen’s nightmares took root, but a beginning all the same.
Eventually, beginnings end.
He constructed a new laptop to replace the one that was lost in the explosion. He learned to write on a laptop, so it was the first thing he consciously created. On the heels of that, a place to plug it in, a desk to set it on, a chair to sit in front of it, a printer, paper, and so on and on.
The skull-typewriter he left behind in the desperate metal tree stump of his first nights. He no longer brewed coffee from the hallucinogenic dust of the Wasteland, and he no longer scraped food from unlabeled soup cans. That was all before.
Sometimes you get what you want.
But wants are fickle things, apt to change at the slightest provocation.
And things had changed quite a bit since those first disjointed days alone in the Wasteland. He stared out of the opening in the garage wall at the jumbled scrapyard behind the Edge of Madness Café. He could have remade the Sanity’s Edge Saloon; it would not have been impossible, but it would also be like going backwards. Remembering it was one thing; trying to relive it—recreate it—was another thing entirely. That way led inevitably to failure.
There was no going back.
Besides, the Saloon was a creation of a Caretaker from long ago, the image faithfully and foolishly upheld by those that followed. Perhaps out of respect, but more likely from ignorance. Those that followed lost sight of reality’s mutability, and the Nexus stayed as a saloon for the sake of dogma. Jack understood that now. Better than Gusman Kreiger. Better even than the Writer.
The Writer—his real name was Algernon he learned later—never truly understood the Nexus. He understood it only as much as he needed to, as much as his predecessor had told him; a predecessor who knew only as much as was told to him. A desperate heritage of ignorance perpetuated over time to create the best and only opportunity a Cast Out like Gusman Kreiger had of ever stealing back the Nexus. But Kreiger underestimated Jack, overestimated himself, and as for Oversight’s betrayal, he never even saw it coming.
There were many times in the first few days that Jack regretted his decision to give up his ticket home. But no matter the cost, it was the right thing to do. He’d liked Oversight—Ariel November, now—deadly and strange though she was, and had no desire to see her tortured or killed.
It still didn’t make being alone any easier.
Much of what came after was like the desert after rain, springing from the lifeless sand in all its splendor as the Nexus made a place for him. Not the inheritance that stymied the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, but a place solely and completely his. It was the way it was always meant to be only no one had seen it before, passing along their own misgivings and insecurities to each new candidate.
Forget the past, or you will surely be doomed to repeat it.
From out of the Wasteland, a small roadside diner adjoined to a garage, disjointed rooms of varying themes pasted one to the next like leftover prefab units hastily bolted together, their seams filled with joint compound and Bond-O.
The back half of the two-story garage had a loft in the rafters; everything Jack needed and none of the distractions. Not so much living quarters as simple plank boards over girders encircling the garage’s top level, loosely constructed storage space with amenities fitted against the walls and connected by narrow catwalks and gangplanks surrounding a hollow of suspended chains, winches and ropes. In one corner, an exposed shower, toilet and sink, privacy not being an issue, anyway. For a bed, a simple bunk off the wall, ceiling chains for support. His laptop was in one corner on a platform of grid-metal surrounded by ornate brass rails next to a missing portion of wall. It afforded a view of the scrapyard behind the garage and café, the blocks not removed so much as they had never been, the corner a conscious omission. He liked the open view, the natural light, the fresh air.
The Nexus peered into the secret places of his mind. He had not consciously created the café or the scrapyard or any of the things found in either. His writing was his only creation, the rest—all the reality surrounding hi
m—was something else entirely, something different and dreamlike, as undisciplined as it was familiar.
How long have you been insane?
Jack descended a narrow stair to the garage floor. In all, the garage was barely wide enough for a single vehicle to be worked upon, and was impractical by any standard. But it was adequate to his needs; he didn’t know anything about cars anyway. A Pepsi machine stood in the corner by a rust-stained sink and an old-style gas pump filled with a bright blue-green fluid the color of chlorophyll. What it was exactly, Jack had no idea. Imagination was like that sometimes. To one side, a long workbench covered in all manner of tools, paint cans, hobby supplies and bric-a-brac he had little time for. He had writing to do.
He walked into the café, its fifties motif focused on black and white tiles, faux-marble and chrome, enormous plate-glass windows, and the glow of neon. There were three booths and a counter with five round stools of polished steel and red leather. An orange neon sign in the front window promised HOT COFFEE ALWAYS.
He wasn’t sure what brought him here. More and more often, he found himself in a part of the Café without knowing why, looking for something, but unsure as to what. It was what brought him to the Wasteland in the first place.
If you never came, you would not be a writer now, and you would never have met her.
The Wurlitzer played Long December by the Counting Crows, which was ironic since there was no December in the Wasteland. No December. No Tuesday afternoon. No Christmas morning. No winter. And no Ellen. Just one day after another of hot, endless summer, only he wasn’t running on a beach with the girl of his dreams, rolling half-naked in the black-and-white celluloid surf. He was alone. And Ellen was alone. And this occurred to him every time he entered the empty diner and the same song started playing to fill the silence. And it was at times like this—especially at times like this—that he wished the Nexus wasn’t tapped quite so deeply into his soul. Whenever he thought about her, he realized how truly alone he was, and how the Nexus denied him the one thing he truly wanted.
He crossed to the large coffee urn behind the counter, took a mug from a waiting rack of freshly cleaned plates and silverware, and placed it beneath the spigot. Today’s flavor was cinnamon-hazelnut. It was the same flavor as at Serena’s Coffee Shoppe; it was not a coincidence.
He stirred in a measure of sugar and cream, and crossed through the dark kitchen to the scrapyard beyond. Above the kitchen was a small theater, a viewing room with only four seats, a screen, and a closet-sized projectionist’s booth. And outside of the kitchen was a restroom filled with a foot of water and home to a pond of water lilies. Reeds and cattails grew along the edges of the toilet stall and in and around the bathtub. It was really more a water garden than a functional bathroom. Unimportant though, since he had a toilet in the loft.
And on the back of the toilet bowl in the loft, stenciled into the porcelain in fine dove-gray enamel, was the name Kohler, Inc. It was also not a coincidence.
Jack sat down on the back stoop, self-pity disguised as restlessness; boredom and loneliness confused for writer’s block. It was what Ellen inadvertently caught in her nightmares, those stolen moments they shared on the dream plane. Uncontrolled, the two met in dream flight, eagles crashing headlong in the darkness. And when they disentangled in some vain effort to sort it out, they lost each other again.
Jagger said it best: You can’t always get what you want.
The strains of Long December flowed through the doorway of the little kitchen, lingering in the scrapyard where the air smelled of hot metal and sweet grass, sun-cracked rubber and old vinyl and kudzu. The sweet grass and kudzu were an illusion. Plants could not live in the Wasteland soil; the dust was dead. But the smells were part of Jack’s memory of junkyards and hot summer days, and so the air smelled of kudzu, though no vines could be found, and the smell of sweet grass was heavy in the sun, though not a single blade of grass had ever grown there, or ever would. Vintage model cars rusted away on their rocker panels, pieces removed and sold by the non-existent attendant from the Last Stop garage, turning them into savaged corpses left in the dust, blinded and hobbled and left to rot. A Buck Rogers rocket ship with nostalgic fins and a glass-bubbled cockpit offered rides for a quarter. Robots stood amidst the debris, relics from science fiction movies like the sad, rusting rocket. A two-legged walker rose fifteen feet in the air, stained and rusted beside a trio of robotic pachyderms, their armored frames pressed against the fence-line, zoo animals staring out at the Wasteland beyond in silent wonder, their weathered, black shells turning orange with rust, bodies immobilized by neglect.
He found a motorcycle parked outside the garage beneath some graffiti: Wild to be wreckage forever. A line from Dickey’s Cherrylog Road. He didn’t wonder where either came from; no writer ever did. The motorcycle was nothing special, neither a sleek Japanese ratchet-popper nor a powerful Hog; it was a simple, cherry-red motor bike, a teen’s first taste of freedom bought with money saved from long, hard summer jobs. Its chrome winked in the morning sun. Wild to be wreckage forever.
He had ridden it into the Wasteland until the café was a whitewashed speck against a vast and unending desert of bone-white sand, small glints of metal and glass to guide him home. And as far as he went, as far as he could see, he found no sign of what he was looking for. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Nothing crawled. Drained dry by his battle with the Cast Outs, the Wasteland was used up, dead. He rode out as far as he dared, as far as he thought he could go and still get back, and all he found was a small, scratched line in the dust. The track of a small insect, a scarab perhaps? But more likely a trail of wind-blown chaff.
He had killed the world.
A three-foot robot, a squat, anime-inspired creation with oversized forearms and feet and a jutting face dominated by a large, reflective hemisphere of glass, polished the dust from the red motorcycle with a rag.
“Hammerlock, you don’t need to do that,” Jack said. The bike had already been polished today, just as it had been polished every day since it first appeared. Hammerlock kept it cleaned and shined, working it over and over, tireless in his efforts, if somewhat unimaginative.
Not unlike yourself.
The robot considered the motorcycle, looked at Jack, then back at the motorcycle. Finally, it straightened and walked off to put the rag away. Hammerlock was the new Guardian, Nail’s replacement. He even resembled the gargoyle a little, a crude mechanical rendition of similar size and shape, of brute mentality and simplicity of purpose. Have you recreated Nail, manufactured him out of steel, plastic and chrome to replace the guardian you lost?
If he had, it was a mistake on many levels. There was nothing for the Guardian to do; nothing left to guard Jack against. There were no more Cast Outs. No more dregs. There was nothing in the Wasteland but dust. Understandably, Hammerlock was bored.
And besides, Nail was irreplaceable; the gargoyle’s sweet, dog-like nature could not be replicated, and any attempt to do so was a disservice. Hammerlock was unlikely to appreciate leftovers or the occasional scratch behind the ears.
Sometimes lost was lost.
A creaking windmill turned slowly in the late afternoon, spinning shadows over a bank of television sets spiked in a semi-circle about a bucket leather seat scavenged from one of the scrapyard derelicts. Jack sat down, over a dozen screens facing him, all of them tuned to different channels. Old-fashioned televisions like those in an antique bus station tele-lounge, relics from another time showing him images from another world. No closed-circuit feeds or satellite programming from a distant and dimly recalled Earth, reruns beamed out into space and forgotten; there was no contact between the Wasteland and anywhere else. Even the dream plane could merely brush reality, never touch it, the world outside his fishbowl.
Or are you outside the fishbowl looking in?
Setting that possibility aside, he looked into the other world.
Soundless images played across all the screens, different people in different pl
aces setting the lines of fate in motion: a coffee shop owner, a bookstore proprietor, a bad therapist, a kindly neighbor and her grandson, Gusman Kreiger—his old nemesis might yet prove useful—and Ellen.
Jack placed his fingers against the glass, watching the silent image of her as she rode the bus, rain soaking her hair and dress, her face. Or was she crying? The notion hardened like glass slivers in his chest. Did she know how much he loved her? Did she know how much he needed her? They were a desperate, codependent couple caught in the grips of their own insanity, each trying to elicit the other’s help in fending off the strangling hold of their own private madness.
But did she know how much he needed her? More perhaps than she needed him? Did she know how sorry he was for everything that had happened, and would happen still? She couldn’t. There was no way.
Would she forgive him?
He hoped so. He needed her so much. Loved her so much.
You are going completely insane.
He sat in front of the screens, a cold cup of coffee in his hand, the sun falling away, the sky turning to black. Day became night and still he watched, hoping against reason that Ellen would find it in her heart to forgive his inadequacies.
A TIME FOR TEA
Ellen remembered riding a bus long ago. A different bus. A different town. A different Ellen Monroe leading a very different life. She was riding the Dreamline, tripping on something; what, she could not remember. But what she experienced she remembered with crystal clarity, a kind of recall had only by psychedelic drugs and near-death experiences. And what she saw on that long-ago afternoon spent in motion—no destination, no direction, no motive for going anywhere or doing anything—was a young woman crying alone. And she wondered in that once-upon-a-time life in her once-upon-a-time drugged haze—how existential the Dreamline could make you—who actually cried on a cross-town bus?
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 11
