The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (12 page)

He cast the limp body
aside, exhausted, and stumbled backwards over the rails to fall upon the
unforgiving sand. No longer screaming, he simply stared, looking for answers
and finding only empty sky.

The first of his forever
moments, it played itself out again and again in his nightmares. His first act
as Caretaker, lord and master of the Nexus, was the brutal murder of a crippled
lunatic.

Congratulations
Caretaker
, a voice
sounding suspiciously like Gusman Kreiger’s whispered.
And what will you do
on your second day?

*     *     *

Ellen still needed him.

Or was it that he still
needed Ellen?

Notions flitted into
existence, spun out their lives like a flurry of mayflies, and fell lifeless upon
the desert sand, husks left behind to recount their stories in silence like
gravestones or forgotten diaries.

Slowly, he began
gathering the pieces together.

The sun was higher,
bright and distant and blazing white. It burned at his arms and face. Another
scorcher in a world that never knew rain, or clouds, or cool autumn breezes.
This was not Earth and he was not rotating around its yellow sun. This was the
Wasteland, and the sun was the sun, but it was not his. The moon would rise
tonight, and it would be full because it was full every night. This was not
Earth. This was the Wasteland.

And he was the Caretaker.

Another remembered
moment.

When Jack came to,
Rebreather was gone, only the Cast Out’s clothing left behind, cast in his
shape like the shedding of some forgotten reptile. That was the way of the
Wasteland. With forever on its side, eventually it won. The Wasteland always
won.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
.

He took the
Confederate-gray overcoat, shaking the bone-colored powder from the sleeves;
the last remnants of Rebreather now reclaimed by a reality he had fought
against all of his life. Rebreather certainly wouldn’t need the coat any
longer. Purged from this place upon his death, all traces of the Cast Out were
fading; even his stink was gone from the fabric. It was threadbare and worn;
but for that, it told no story of the man Jack knew only as Rebreather. What
his actual name was had long ago been forgotten by everyone, including Rebreather
himself.

And as Jack donned the
coat, the last of Rebreather’s possessions, an assortment of weapons and
clothing and rattling trinkets, calcified under the face of the blazing white
sun to become a wind-blasted outline eroding into dust. Jack hardly noticed as
he walked away, scattering the Cast Out’s remains beneath his feet.

Rebreather had finally
freed himself from the Wasteland.

When are you leaving,
Jack?
the voice
asked.

He wasn’t sure.

Maybe you should have
the undertaker set aside an extra box, just in case?

Fuck you!

Fuck me? Look around
yourself, boy-o. You tell me who’s
fucked.

*     *     *

Another crystalline
moment.

He found the Nexus by
instinct, feeling the roots of power in a small patch of sand. As he neared it,
he could feel it in his chest, a shiver in his solar plexus. This would be the
place to start. It was the beginning and the ending, the center from which all
things came. All the rest had been blasted to flinders and scrap, his doing.
Ten feet away, the railroad tracks had been ripped apart by the explosion and
strewn like taffy among the debris. Ahead of him, maybe thirty feet, the edge
of reality. The tracks ran out across this emptiness before, suspended from
nothing, resting on air, stretching out into the distance until the lines met
in a blur of chrome-bright steel and disappeared altogether over their own
event horizon. But that was before. Now there was nothing beyond the edge but
emptiness.

So much to do.

He found a length of pipe in the wreckage and thrust it into
the dust directly over the Nexus. It would begin here, he thought.

Everything must begin somewhere.

*     *     *

And another moment.

Jack sifted the wreckage
like a beachcomber searching for trinkets on the Jersey shore. Most was
garbage, but one thing survived miraculously unscathed. And what made that a
wonder was that it had not existed at the time of the blast. It had never
existed at all, actually.

Under the failing light
of dusk, Jack Lantirn found a book.
His
book.
The Sanity’s Edge
Saloon
. He marveled at the glossy newness of the cover, a cover he might
have imagined in his arrogance, but which had never before existed. He was
tempted to try and read it, but thought that might be dangerously distracting,
an act of pure hubris, the folly of Narcissus. Besides, he was exhausted and
the light was fading, and too many of the passages would only make him sad. The
book was what he had been looking for, but it wasn’t meant for him. He knew the
book. He had written it;
lived
it. What would reading it prove? This was
meant for another.

He turned about to find a
small residential mailbox near the edge of the cliff, out of place but perfectly
normal, its weathered post jammed into the Wasteland, a box of unpainted,
galvanized metal mounted slightly askew, the bolts starting to rust. He didn’t
wonder where it came from. A writer never would. He simply accepted its
presence. And without a second thought, Jack went to the mailbox, opened it,
and placed the only existing copy of
The Sanity’s Edge Saloon
inside. He
raised the small metal flag attached to the side, and walked back to the center
of the wreckage.
It is beginning
.

Around him, more things
were changing. It was difficult to keep up.

Some first day,
Caretaker.

The pipe planted atop the
Nexus was gone, replaced by an antenna grown forty feet into the air, a
complex, tapering structure of reinforced copper and steel strewn with metal
divining rods and receivers and dishes made black by the setting sun. And
strangled in the antenna’s metalwork was a mishmash of ill-conceived pieces, a
deranged expressionist’s rendering: a sickle, a sword, a bottle opener, a
screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle, a pry bar, and the remnants of a beer
tap and a Wurlitzer jukebox. A new focal lens for the Nexus, his means of
tapping its power and directing it at reality, a replacement for the old focal
lens, the lightning rod that Gusman Kreiger stole.

More pieces of forever
ago.

Besides, Kreiger
wasn’t really gone, was he? Not him. Sneaky motherfucker.

By the cliff’s edge, a
small round structure appeared. It looked like an old boiling vat or a small
fuel tank with a large hatch cut into the side. Various pipes poured down into
the ground from its barrel-shape like the roots of a tree, and it was that
image that made Jack realize what the thing on the edge of the cliff most
resembled: a tree stump, the rust-pitted surface peeling long, sun-cracked
curls of paint like the mottled bark of a dead birch.
Was it possible to
neglect something that did not even exist a moment ago?
Unimportant. Half
moons of metal hung upon the exterior like shelf fungus, the top open to the
sky.

He didn’t wonder where it
came from. A writer never would. Might as well ask where a writer’s ideas came
from. The answer was unimportant.

He wandered over, opened
the door, and lay down against the cold metal, exhaustion overtaking him. And
he dreamed.

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 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
him—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 places 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.