Irony has a funny way of making you hate your own memories.
She pushed the same piece of wet hair back from her face over and over, the movement disguising her efforts to wipe at her eyes. She didn’t want to be crying on a cross-town bus. She wanted to be strong. She had to be strong.
But everything was going wrong, and no one understood. Even she didn’t understand anymore. She had to rescue Jack, free him from the Wasteland. But Jack wasn’t real, just a character in a book, a face out of a dream. He didn’t exist.
No wonder they thought she was insane.
Her fist ached from the effort of crushing the wadded prescription, trying to make it disappear. Useless. Easy enough to flatten and fill at any drugstore. Kohler would know if she didn’t. He would punish her; send her back to the sanitarium.
And there, Jack would be destroyed forever.
Right back where she started, head under water and still sinking, her progress, her belief in her own normalcy, the greatest example of her delusion. All this time, sliding backwards, back to the reality from before. Before her spartan third-floor apartment, before the old woman across the landing and her grandson—not too bright, but clever with his hands—before Mr. Dabble and her job at the bookstore, before Dr. Kohler and his sugared lies, eyes licking her skin. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, she was falling past the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, past Nail and Gusman Kreiger and Jack (especially Jack). She was dropping all the way down into the straitjacket and the padded walls of the hospital—not sanitarium or asylum; negative words that made people uncomfortable—where they kept you if your father was rich enough and influential enough to buy you out of a manslaughter charge. Not because he cared, but because having a criminal for a daughter was a political liability, messy if indelicately handled. So you wear pajamas all day and a straitjacket if you misbehave, sit in a room with soft walls and listen to the muffled screams and howls and random gibbering of the institutionalized beneath the delicate overtones of music meant to soothe. The daily indignities of group therapy confessions, one-on-one discussions about her rejection of authority being misplaced self-loathing, a regimen of pretty colored pills. Say, do you remember the color of Lithium, anyway? Or maybe, just maybe, a shot of muscle relaxant and a rubber mouth-guard while a kindly nurse monitors the voltage on a pair of electrodes pasted to your temples with conductive gel.
The image brushed her spine like icy fingers, and made her shiver.
This was the part of the dream where you knew you were screaming only you couldn’t make a sound, where you were falling forever, the world tipping up on its edge, emptying you off like the remains of a meal scraped from a dinner plate and poured down the drain. And there was nothing you could do to stop it. She was going all the way back, back to being lost, trapped in the vast limitless world inside of her dreams while the wasteland that was reality eroded around her, collapsing away into nothingness. Just like before, it was happening all over again. Everything was changing, but nothing had changed. Jack made it different, but he couldn’t make it last, and now it was all going back to the way it was.
So maybe Kohler was right. Maybe there was no Jack Lantirn. Maybe he didn’t exist. Maybe Jack was nothing more than a byproduct of her fantasies, a delusion, a fabrication based on the character of a book.
Maybe the true reality was her insanity.
Well, good-morning to you, sunshine.
It would begin simply, like all things: a prescription, some mood-leveling medication. And with that first step, she would slowly and inexorably reconstruct the reality she had fled all that time ago when she found herself whisked away to the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. Only this time, the Saloon wouldn’t save her. Jack wouldn’t save her. How could he if he didn’t exist? This time, she would try to kill herself. Not like before; she had not tried to kill herself before, of that she was certain … reasonably certain … pretty certain … probably certain, anyway.
But this time she would try. And this time, she might just succeed.
Through angry tears, she saw the tight fist, fingers aching and exhausted, knuckles white as she worked to contain the awful truth of Kohler’s prescription and everything that went along with it. Here it would end. And here it would start.
And she had no idea how to stop it.
Or if she should even try.
I’m so sorry, Jack, but I can’t go back again. Not to the hospitals and the treatments and the dark rooms with the soft walls, strapped down to a bed while the drugs they pump into me take me down again and again and again. I won’t be able to survive it a second time. It’s your fault. You showed me something different, and now I can’t accept this world for what it is. But it was only dreams. I know that should be enough, but it’s not. I can’t deal with the hospital. Not again. I’ll die. Or I’ll get sane. Either way I’ll lose you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
She rang the bell as the bus came to her stop, and stepped into the rain. And there she stood, the air cool and pleasant after the cloying humidity of the bus, the heavy smell of strangers, of damp hair and wet clothes and body odor and sticky vinyl seats. She breathed deep, looking around like someone looking for a way out of a crowded room.
Half a block away, Dabble’s Books. Across the street, Serena’s Coffee Shoppe. On the one side, her nice normal job with her nice normal boss and her nice normal life.
On the other side of the street, coffee.
That was how it began with Jack. He found her in the waiting room, shaking through a violent drug come-down that first morning at the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, and he brought her coffee. So long ago, it seemed; days or weeks or maybe lifetimes.
Or maybe it never really happened at all.
But what if it did? What if all that mattered was that she remembered that it happened, and that it all began with a cup of coffee?
* * *
Serena looked up as Ellen came in out of the rain. “You’re drenched.”
With the workday ended, the coffee shop stood deserted, much to Ellen’s relief. She didn’t care to be seen this way, enduring the consternation and pity of strangers, her hair plastered and dripping, dress clinging and wrinkled, a bag over one shoulder and a prescription sheet squeezed into one hand like a street person wandering in from the elements, looking for food and spare change.
Her open hand was shaking.
“Well don’t just stand there, come over and sit down.” Serena was coming out from behind the counter, a towel and a shawl in hand, her movements so fluid and smooth that Ellen would have sworn Serena had been holding them all along, waiting for her to arrive. She led Ellen away to a small table in the back, out of view of the street and Dabble’s Books, placing the woven shawl over her shoulders and drying some of the rain from her hair. “What happened to you?”
“I got caught in the rain,” Ellen answered.
“I should say you did. Sit down and I’ll bring us some tea.”
She didn’t want to sound ungrateful, so she silently pressed at her hair with the towel until it stopped dripping down her neck, and waited for Serena to return with two teacups balanced easily in their saucers. She placed one before Ellen, the aroma an inviting mix of green tea, mint and something sweet.
“Would you like sugar or cream?” Serena asked. Ellen was shaking her head, but Serena’s business-side had emerged. “I also have honey, lemon, and skim milk if you’d like that? Sorry, no half-n-half.”
Not caring either way, Ellen asked more from curiosity than need. “Did you run out?”
“No,” Serena answered, sitting down across from her. “I don’t believe in it. It’s indecisive. You either want cream, or you want skim. Half-and-half is middle ground, timid and contradictory, so I don’t offer it; you have to commit to a course of action. It’s the only way.”
Then Serena dismissed the subject with an offhand wave, a gesture both dignified and final. “So what happened? Did you get caught without your umbrella?”
Ellen nodded; the truth—she didn’t own
an umbrella, and would rather stand in the rain than inside her shrink’s office—sounded too neurotic.
“Well next time you should really try to get under cover,” Serena scolded mildly. “Summer or not, you could catch a cold. You’re shaking.”
Again Ellen nodded, placing a hand around the delicate teacup, drinking the warmth through her fingers. Almost instinctively, she released the wadded prescription slip and left it forgotten on the table as she placed her other hand to the cup’s side. “I thought colds were caused by a virus, and not weather?” she said conversationally.
Serena offered a smile both knowledgeable and slightly condescending. “Tell that to Daisy Miller. The tea should help warm you up. Do you have far to go to get yourself home? I have a spare umbrella if you need one.”
“Actually, I should get back to work,” Ellen said. “I need Tuesday and Friday afternoons off, so I come in afterwards to help Mr. Dabble with his inventory.”
“His inventory,” Serena said, the idea somehow amusing her. She leaned her chin upon her fist, eyes sparkling majestically. “So how is Nicky?”
Serena’s familiarity with her boss still surprised her. “Okay, I guess. Do you know him well?”
“Nicky and I go way back,” Serena replied.
“Oh. He never speaks of you.”
“No,” Serena said with that same superior half-smile. “He wouldn’t.”
Ellen raised the tea to her lips, the aroma strong with peppermint, and took a sip. “This is delicious.”
“Thank you,” Serena said. “It’s a special blend of my own. The rose hips give it a tart sweetness.” Then the coffee shop owner leaned across the table and whispered conspiratorially, “and a dribble of Irish whiskey helps ward off the chill.”
Ellen stifled a laugh, looking away so that she could swallow and hide her smile. That quick, Serena picked up the crumpled prescription slip from the tabletop.
“Well, that’s one way to keep something safe from the rain, but I’m afraid it looks a little worse for wear.” The auburn-haired woman deftly unraveled the paper, her clever fingers sorting the slip apart, uncreasing and unfolding until it lay exposed in the middle of the small table.
“It looks like a prescription,” Serena observed.
Ellen stared at the piece of paper between them, a scrawl of blue, fountain-tip lines telling some kind of illegible story, a secret language known only to doctors and pharmacists. “Everyone thinks I’m crazy.”
“Are you?” Serena asked gently.
“I didn’t used to think so,” Ellen answered.
“And now?”
“Now I’m not so sure.”
“Well, I have just the thing,” Serena said, up again and heading back behind the counter. Ellen looked ruefully at the prescription, and considered simply pocketing the slip before Serena returned. But Serena was back in an instant with a decorative teapot and a flat circle of polished marble. She neatly placed the marble coaster over the prescription slip then set the teapot down on top of it. “There, that should flatten it nicely. If you offered it to a druggist in that condition, he might think it was meant to be discarded, or that you came by it inappropriately.”
Ellen nodded politely, but thought the effort unnecessary.
“Is he good?”
“Who?” Ellen asked.
“Your doctor. The one you just came from.”
Ellen took a sip of tea, the question playing in her mind as she carefully chose each word of her answer. But when she opened her mouth to speak, what came out—for the second time that day—was not what she intended, something practiced and contrived, but the unvarnished truth. “No, but he thinks he is.”
Serena’s eyebrows tilted with polite interest. She would not press for details—etiquette forbade it—instead lifting her cup to drink some of the tea.
“I don’t think he has my best interests in mind,” Ellen added, a little afraid of what she had set in motion; once begun, some things could never go back the way they were.
So what. Things weren’t going all that well before, anyway.
“I hope you don’t mind my asking, but if you don’t think he’s helping, why do you see him?”
Ellen exhaled, searching for answers and finishing her tea instead.
Serena refilled Ellen’s cup without asking. “I shouldn’t have pried,” she said apologetically.
“No, it’s okay. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t see him at all.”
“But you don’t?”
She shook her head. “My release is conditional: I keep a job, I stay in town, I check in regularly with my assigned social worker—she’s like a parole officer, only without the stigma—and I see Dr. Kohler twice a week.”
Rather kindly, Serena did not ask what she had been released from, either out of politeness or simple disinterest. “But if he’s not helping, how can that be beneficial? You should have him replaced. There are plenty of psychiatrists out there. How hard can it be to find one if their profession advertises on the radio?”
Ellen smiled. “It’s more complicated than that. Dr. Kohler and my father have an arrangement. If Dr. Kohler were to suggest it, I’m sure my father wouldn’t hesitate to put me back in the hospital where he could safely forget about me, one less drug-addicted, screw-up daughter ruining his political aspirations.”
“I’m sorry, Ellen.”
And it was the conversation with Mrs. Desmond all over again, only now she was on the other side. When it all came out, no one could offer you anything but apologies. “I guess all of that would be okay—not okay, I mean, but I could understand it, you know—except that Dr. Kohler isn’t just interested in fixing my head. There’s something about the way he looks at me …”
Her voice failed. She felt the words surging forth, the trickle of a confession that had somehow become a flood of jetsam and debris entangling one unwary coffee shop owner whose only fault was being kind enough to offer her shelter from the rain. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be bothering you with all this. Thank you for the tea.” Ellen was halfway to reaching for her bag, rising from her chair.
“Nonsense,” Serena said crisply, laying a hand upon Ellen’s arm and making her stay. “Sit. Clearly you have a lot going on right now. If it helps to talk about it, then it’s the least I can do. Nothing bad will happen to you in here, I promise you.”
Ellen relaxed a little, eyes on the thickly varnished floor. “I appreciate that.”
“Understand, of course, advice comes with the tea. This doctor of yours, I don’t like. I don’t place much store in doctors, psychiatrists least of all. If he harbors any interest in you other than as a patient, he’s not a professional, and that certainly can’t be helpful. Do you know what he prescribed for you?” Serena asked, an edge in her voice.
“Lithium, I think,” Ellen confessed.
Serena gave Ellen’s arm a friendly squeeze. “It’s only my opinion, so take it for what it’s worth, but you should get yourself away from this doctor. Lithium is typically used to treat manic-depression and mood swings, and the only depression I have ever seen in you since you first walked through my door is on Tuesdays and Fridays when you see your doctor. He sounds more like the problem than the solution.”
“I was diagnosed as delusional and manic-depressive.” Ellen whispered. “I killed someone; I think they were attacking me, but the truth is I was so high at the time I don’t really remember what happened. I hardly remember my past at all, and what I do seems an awful lot like what happened in a book I read. So maybe that makes me crazy after all. Everyone’s convinced I self-medicated my depression with hallucinogens, which is stupid, and that I intentionally overdosed because I wanted to kill myself—”
“Did you?”
“Not that I remember, but my memory is just bits and pieces, and what there is doesn’t make any sense anyway. If I try to accuse Dr. Kohler of anything, they’ll just think I was lying. It might just reinforce his recommendation for my committal.” An exhausted breath of air stu
mbled from Ellen’s mouth, a low, bitter laugh. “Maybe they’re right. I mean, I don’t think I can tell the difference between reality and fantasy anymore anyway, so maybe I am crazy.”
Serena reached across the table, closing her hands over Ellen’s, trapping her to the warmth of the teacup. Looking up, Ellen was struck by the brilliance of the coffee shop owner’s eyes, vibrant and jewel-like. “Ellen, you are not crazy.”
Despite the palpable certainty of Serena’s words, there were things the coffee shop owner did not know, could not know: the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, the Wasteland, Jack and the book that all of these things were based upon. Or is the book based upon all of these things? What would Serena think if she knew the truth? What’s that, Ellen? You believe you were magically transported to a world that doesn’t exist except in a piece of drugstore fiction, and there you fell in love with a guy who doesn’t exist except in your dreams? Well, fetch the butterfly nets, fellas, ‘cause we got ourselves a live one here. Without knowing the truth, it was easy for Serena to insist Ellen was sane.
For her part, Ellen wasn’t so sure.
So tell her the truth, a voice in her head said cheerily. If she still insists you’re sane, at least you’ll know she’s making an informed decision—just like Dr. Kohler is. And hey, if she calls the cops and has you hauled away as a lunatic or a stalker or a whatever, well, that tells you something too, doesn’t it?
“Before I moved here, I was in an asylum. I killed someone, a pusher who attacked me while we were getting high. I remember waking up and seeing him die. I also remember being taken out of the hospital to a place on the edge of reality. I met a man there, a writer named Jack who could control reality with his writing, only he was new and not very good at it. Eventually, Jack managed to send me here … at least, I think he meant to send me here. I remember climbing aboard a train that was leaving the Wasteland. Then the next thing I remember, I was back here in the real world and I was reading a book written by Jack Lantirn about events that happened at the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. Only I’m a character in this book. Like it all happened for real, and Jack was just writing it down. Or I made it all up after reading the book because I’m crazy. No one seems to know anything about where the book came from, or about Jack Lantirn. They figure I’m crazy and this is all some delusional byproduct of my imagination.” Ellen let go a long, shaky breath. “A part of me wants to believe them, to forget it all. But I can’t. I’m pretty sure Jack is still back there, and that he needs my help. He saved me, and now I have to save him. But I don’t know how, or even where to start.”
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 12
