The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (8 page)

Jasper felt a tingling
sensation run through his scalp, and standing there before the Goose Man,
looking into his different-colored eyes and brutally beaten face, Jasper
Desmond again saw the pieces of the plane he would build. Only now he saw them
differently, saw the changes he needed to make, the subtle variations that would
improve lift, enhance control, adjust for the pitch and yaw of
inter-dimensional winds. He saw steering cables and lightweight reinforced
pieces for the frame. He saw all of this, comprehended only a fraction of it,
and knew only one thing with absolute certainty: if he built the machine he saw
so perfectly in his mind,
he would fly
.

“Mistuh Goose Man, are
you Jesus?”

Gusman Kreiger smiled
that same horrific, broken smile he flashed earlier; it was a common misunderstanding.
“Lie upon the ground, placing your cheek to the earth, and look at my feet.”

And Jasper did exactly
that. A part of him knew that he shouldn’t, knew this sounded a little too much
like what someone would say who wanted to touch him; touch him in a way that
wasn’t right. Gramma warned him about people like that, people who wanted to
touch him in certain places, or wanted him to touch them. She warned him about
them the way she warned him about the bad men who sold drugs that would make
him sick, or the bad ladies who would try to make him feel special, but would
only take his money. She had warned him about all of these things. And as he
lay upon the ground, face to one side so that he would have an excellent view
of Goose Man’s feet, the shoddy, sole-worn boots bare inches from his nose, he
heard his grandmother’s stern warning ring back clear as day.
You be careful
out there, Jasper. You be careful of bad men and women who want to give you
things, or take things from you, or touch your thingy. You tell them no, then
you run right home. Do you understand? You run right home.

He understood. But maybe,
just this once, Gramma might not be right. Not about this.

“Watch closely,” Goose
Man instructed.

Not at all.

As Jasper watched, the
man stretched upward, first upon the balls of his feet, and then his toes. Then
even his toes left the earth.

Jasper reached out,
running his hand through the space between the ground and the soles of Goose
Man’s boots, nothing holding the man up but his shadow. Then he glanced up and
saw Goose Man floating with his arms stretched out like a forgotten scarecrow,
or Jesus dying upon the cross, and he saw the man’s different-colored eyes
staring down upon him from beneath the shadow of the wide-brimmed hat. And Goose
Man was smiling a familiar, frightening smile from his cracked and battered
face.

“You see, I know a thing
or two about flying.”

Like Gusman Kreiger, Ellen
also knew a thing or two about flying. She had simply forgotten.

Behind walls of glass,
she watched the large, tropical fish drifting effortlessly while schools of tinier
fish darted back and forth, shimmers of acid-etched chrome. An angelfish wafted
gently towards a backing of artificial coral and rock. Neon-bright clowns
pushed in and out of the thickened bodies of anemones, forests of tubule limbs
swollen and smooth and glimmering like polished opals. A catfish wriggled
amongst the layers of sapphire-colored stones at the bottom, searching, always
searching. Maybe for a way out.

“You like to watch them,
don’t you?”

Ellen risked a single
glance away from the aquarium. “I suppose.”

She hated the fish; hated
their condition, their lives spent in a glass cell, all directions closed and totally
unaware. Unaware of being watched, unaware they lived to amuse others, unaware
their existence was reduced to characters trapped within the confines of a story,
stuck between the pages like flowers pressed in a book.

Kohler’s pen scratched
the notepad on his lap, one finger rubbing gently at his lip. He didn’t believe
her. Whenever he rubbed his lip, it meant he didn’t believe her. Well, fuck
him. He would never understand. She was the only one who understood.

And she was crazy.

“Can we talk about Jack?”
he asked.

“Why?”

“In our last session, you
said he sacrificed himself to save you. Can you tell me what you meant by
that?”

Whenever she spoke about
Jack, it always came out like the self-indulgent rant of a born-again, the
too-enthusiastic proclamations of a Baptist lay-preacher.
He saved me!
Healed my soul and made me live again! And I surely do love him! I love him
deeply, praise God, Hallelujah!
But to the rest of the world, she was merely
a lunatic, something to be cured or destroyed.

Unless none of what
happened was real, in which case she was delusional and paranoid, adrift in her
self-aggrandizing fantasies. Eventually, the madness would consume her, and she
would disappear altogether.

Either way, problem
solved.

Dr. Kohler regarded her
quietly from his chair, pen scratching the pad while one finger rubbed
contemplatively at his bottom lip, his head occasionally dropping in a
supplicating nod. It was a practiced gesture, one she had seen before; not just
from him, but from other doctors, defense lawyers, and even police detectives.
It was a way of reaching out, connecting:
please go on. I understand you,
but I am not judging you. I am another human being, and I am concerned about
you. I value your feelings and thoughts and want only the best for you
.

Blah-blah-blah
.

For some delinquents and
criminals and misunderstood nut jobs, it was the exact response they wanted, an
open sounding board for their problems, their peeves, their petty foibles they
worried were indicative of some deeper, more dangerous psychosis. For Ellen,
the effort was wasted. She did not want to be here, and if that made her seem
reluctant to achieve normalcy then so be it. This was an arrangement between
her father, Dr. Kohler and an exasperated district attorney eager to cut a deal
since the only dead body belonged to a drug-addicted dealer named Lenny who
liked to prostitute underage girls. No one was weeping over his loss,
especially since he died while trying to rape his killer. Forget she might also
be slightly (or not so slightly) insane; a minor detail, hardly worth
mentioning.

Or maybe that was the
other reality, the one that didn’t exist. She wasn’t sure anymore.

Nothing before the Edge
felt real.

For the
first four weeks, Dr. Kohler repeatedly asked about the incident with Lenny.
Only he called him Leonard Tucker. Not Lenny, fellow Dreamline rider, or Lenny,
her connection, or even Lenny, the miserable little rat-fuck who tried to run
his hands over her, but Leonard Tucker. The first time Dr. Kohler asked her
about Leonard Tucker, she actually had no idea who he was talking about. He was
always just Lenny, Lenny whose last moments were spent staring at her while his
blood spilled out around the plastic yellow handle of the sharpened screwdriver
she buried in his throat, his pants around his ankles, his eyes already dead
and empty. Poor Lenny. Lenny’s death went largely unnoticed, no cause for
anything more than cursory concern. After all, Ellen was not a murderer, but a victim.
And as for Lenny, well, when a fish turns belly-up in the tank, you don’t call
the funeral home; you scoop it out and flush it down the toilet, and write a
note to yourself to stop at the pet store tomorrow for a new fish. Poor Lenny.

Her overdose—what Kohler
routinely referred to as her
attempted suicide
—was another favorite
topic at these sessions. How did she feel about it now? Did she still think
about killing herself? Was she sleeping a lot, or maybe not at all? There was
no answer to these questions since she had no recollection of the incident.
When Dr. Kohler spoke of it, it was like he was telling her about someone else;
someone she didn’t know, had never heard of, someone without relevance to her.
It was like reading
The Bell Jar
, and thinking only that Sylvia Plath had
a quirky sense of humor. But Dr. Kohler was insistent: she had overdosed.

She did remember taking hallucinogens,
the infamous Dreamline—they agreed upon some salient factors—but after that,
reality forked: hers went one way, everyone else went another.

Dr. Kohler claimed she
was refusing to confront what happened.

Pompous jackass!
Just because the rest of the world
did not understand did not make her wrong.

Or did it?

Dr. Kohler stared
fixedly, finger rubbing lightly against his lip, eyes flat and lingering like the
dead stare of a waiting snake. The pen scratched the paper of his notepad, and
Ellen wondered how long she had been silent, lost in her own thoughts.

“Would you like to talk about that?” Kohler asked.

Ellen sat back in the chair, mind scrambling backwards
through her thoughts to finish something she did not recall starting. “About
Jack?”

“Sure.”

“He stayed behind; made sure I escaped. I saw him. I know
what he did. Now he’s living on in my dreams.”

“Like a memory?”

“More like a ghost. It’s complicated.”

“But Jack is also a character in the book, right?
The
Sanity’s Edge Saloon
?”

“Yes, he’s in the book. But he’s also real.”

“So you said. He’s the main character of the book, though. A
book he wrote, like an autobiography. And there’s only the one copy of the book?
The one you have?”

“Yes.”

Kohler scribbled something on the pad. “But Jack is still
appearing in your dreams?”

Ellen nodded, feeling the heat creeping up her neck and into
her face. She should have known better, should have remembered the rules for
dealing with Dr. Kohler; rules that protected her, protected her dreams, protected
the truth—even if she was the only one who knew it. Kohler possessed a
predator’s patience and camouflage, always watching, biding his time, looking
for that right moment to move. He set her nerves on edge, his blank-eyed stare
and lip-rubbing and nodding, his long gaps in conversation waiting for her to
fill in the holes.

And against her own better judgment, she had.

Then, like a spider laying in wait, Dr. Kohler struck. The
flat expression, the rubbing of the lip, the barely concealed look of
condescension that was a little pitying, a little menacing, and more than a
little hungry, were all simply layers of his true face, the trolling predator,
the one that hears opportunity in the pained cries of an animal caught in a jaw
trap. Ellen withdrew a little further into the chair, crossed her legs a little
tighter, and wondered for the umpteenth time why this session seemed to be
going on forever.

“Where were you just a moment ago?” Dr. Kohler asked, voice
soothing and toneless; a non-judgmental judge; an uncaring caretaker.

“What?”

“A moment ago you were staring off into space. What were you
thinking of just then?”

“Umm, I was just…” Just what? Thinking how much she hated
being here, hated him, wanted to leave? Thinking to herself that she was sane,
and that this was a waste of time? Jack was real, and the Sanity’s Edge was
real, and just because she couldn’t find the bridge back to that world didn’t
make it any less real, just lost.

But like it or not, her insistence of Jack’s reality made her
insane, her antics justification for Kohler’s stare just as they were
justification for her father’s actions.

You were getting in his way.

For years, her only contact with her father consisted of
speeches, money for bail and lawyers, and his insistence she not fuck up his political
aspirations. To him and Kohler and everyone else in this world, she was a
lunatic who could barely be trusted to look after herself, who would babble
endlessly about phantom people who had never been real, figments from a
literary landscape that she believed existed, but for which she had no proof.
And no proof of something like the Sanity’s Edge Saloon meant it did not exist.
Could not, never had, and never would. It was Shangri-La, lost Atlantis, Oz. It
was the imagined American West or the nineteen-fifties when everything was
still perfect and wholesome and right in America. It was make-believe, a
byproduct of manic-depression, an overactive imagination, and a checkered
history of hallucinogens, their random flashbacks tearing loose from her mind
like restless haunts refusing to cross over.

Only none of that was true. Jack was real. Her friend and
guardian, lover and confidant, protector and …
savior
.

And there it was again. Jack was as fallible and confused and
astonished by everything going on around him as anyone. Only when the time
came, Jack had done what was necessary, saving her and the others, sending them
home. How could she ignore his sacrifice by retreating into the same world he
had liberated her from?

She had to return: to there, to
him
. Before Jack,
there was only an endless ribbon of disjointed memories stitched together with
sticky, mescaline dreams and gum-covered, LSD nightmares serving only to close
the door on a reality she detested but could not escape, and open a window into
a reality she longed for but could never hold.

Until she found the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

Caught on the edge of an endless wasteland and a bottomless
abyss, the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. Some of it Jack wrote about: the unfinished
stairway to heaven, the half-bathroom missing most of the walls, ceiling, and
even part of the floor. Then there were the things she knew, the things Jack
never wrote down, but which she remembered because she was there. A soapbox
left on the roof where Jack editorialized, though never in front of her or the
others. And behind the claw-footed tub, the brass frog statue holding towels
and soap on upraised flippers, an improbable metal erection jutting obscenely
from between its legs. She didn’t have to make any of this up, crazy as it
might sound. Some of it was in Jack’s book, written between the lines. And some
she just knew because she was there. Jack’s computer was called the Jabberwock;
he used it for writing because writing was the way to set the script that the
Nexus would use to transform reality, the only way to be free from the
Wasteland. He had five tickets out, five stories and no more. He used them to
save her, Lindsay, Leland Quince, Alex and Oversight, sending them all away to
their new lives. Oversight cost him his ticket out, but he was indebted to her,
and refused to leave her behind to face the wrath of Gusman Kreiger. And so he
doomed himself, a prisoner in the Wasteland on the edge of all realities until
the end of time.

Was it a greater act of love to sacrifice yourself for
another, or to spend your final moments together? She didn’t know the answer to
that question, but apparently Jack did. And she hated him for that. With only
one ticket left out of the Wasteland, Jack had chosen to save Ellen by sending
her away, and dooming himself in the process.

No wonder you confuse him with a messiah. You might as
well just add the line, “But for your grace, I would have no life in me.”

Kohler eyed her in her silence, his face an all-too-familiar
mask of feigned concern covering his predator’s fangs. “You’re back there
again,” he observed.

She caught the faintest glimmer of a smile tugging at his
mouth before his finger moved to rub it away. His lips hid rows of small,
pointed teeth, straight and white and possibly capped. Rodent teeth, vicious
and hurtful. The sight of them made her shrink.

“Tell me what you’re thinking right now.”

That your teeth should be snatching chicks from their
nests, or chewing through the neck of a baby rabbit killed in its hole.

But talk like that would only make things worse. And there
was always something worse. That realization was the straw that eventually
broke everyone, how well she knew. So she gambled, the words past her lips
before she could reconsider, bubbles floating above her as she sank below the
surface.