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

It was nearly eight the
next time Ellen awoke.

She wrapped the blanket
around herself like some homeless beggar, and walked to the window where the
rain had been hitting the screen for the last hour. A puddle had formed on the
floor beneath the sill, but that didn’t really concern her. She simply closed
the window and walked to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Mr. Dabble wasn’t
expecting her at the store until 9:30; plenty of time for a shower, an
unhurried breakfast, and even a visit to
Serena’s Coffee Shoppe
.

She stood in the shower,
forehead against the tile, and let the water run down through her hair and
across her skin. Like standing in a waterfall, she thought idly. Then, as she
thought about it a little longer, she supposed it really wasn’t like that at
all; it was only a shower.

But it was a welcome
sensation all the same.

She always felt better if
she could get back to sleep before first light. In the twilight, her dreams
were better. She would see Jack, speak with him, touch him; so different from
the hollow-eyed nightmares of being alone. In the nightmares, even when Jack
was there, he was oblivious, as though she was a ghost he could not see, could
not hear. She watched him shiver beneath the night sky, the Wasteland sand as
white as the bones of everyone who had ever died there across all the years of
eternity. She saw him scrape the residue from the inside of an old soup can,
hunger reducing him to a stray dog. She saw him scribble his stories on rare
pieces of paper, front and back filled from corner to corner, top to bottom in
tight, tiny script like the ravings of a lunatic. Paper was difficult to come
by in the Wasteland.

And therein lay the
problem. This made-up world, senseless and nonexistent, was
known
to
her. She knew things about it, both things from the book and things not, but still
true all the same. She had no way of knowing any of it for certain, no proof
she could point to. But still, she
knew
.

But which dreams to
believe? In the nightmares, Jack lived a mad hermit’s existence on the edge of
a cliff bordering unrestricted dreams-turned-to-lunacy, huddling in the blasted
wreckage of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, and battering out his stories on a broken
typewriter incapable of accessing the Nexus and making them real. Then there
were the dreams where Jack remade the focal lens that Gusman Kreiger stole,
rebuilt the world around him in his own image, a small god starting his own
book of Genesis on the outskirts of reality. In the nightmares, she was kept
from him, living only through the breeze or the cold face of the moon. He did
not know of her, could not sense her near him, or know that she cared. In the
twilight dreams, he could always see her, though they did not talk with the
urgency or passion of lovers parted, but the simple familiarity of two people
alone in a house, moving from room to room, offering brief conversation or
greetings as they passed. Either reality was plausible, she supposed.

And either just as likely
untrue.

The water turned suddenly
scalding as someone in the apartment complex ran the cold water out of her
pipes. She yelped and leaped back from the steaming jets, standing awkwardly on
one foot in the far corner of her tub while she waited for the water pressure
to normalize.
That’s what you get for spending too much time inside your
head. Just make peace with the here and now? Accept it.

Accept it.

She gingerly tested the water with her hand before rinsing
herself off and climbing out. The sky outside was the sad gray of summer rain,
of a missed morning that would clear by the afternoon. Good. She had her
appointment with Dr. Kohler today, and she hated waiting in the rain for the
bus. And she refused to wait in his tiny office, eyeing the fixtures or
pretending to read the magazines he left on the coffee table, out of date and uninteresting.
She left the moment her session was complete, and refused to think about going
back until her next appointment. Her freedom was conditional: twice-weekly
sessions with Dr. Frederick Kohler. But damned if she would lose one more
minute of her life in his office, her thoughts scrutinized, her dreams picked apart.

A shiver ran through her.
Better to stand in the rain.

She put on a white summer
dress and a pair of slip-on sneakers; the hardwood floor at
Dabble’s Books
was no place for heels, and Dr. Kohler needed no additional encouragement. The
dress would be sufficiently distracting. Not that there was anything obvious
about Dr. Kohler—no lingering stare at her breasts, or the accidental brush of
the knee—but the impression remained; there was something about Dr. Kohler that
simply wasn’t right.

Paranoia is a sign of
mental illness.

Her freedom had three
conditions: maintain gainful employment, stay within the city limits, and meet
twice a week with the court-appointed therapist, Dr. Frederick Kohler. Kohler
also reported to her father; Daddy’s means of assuring Ellen stayed safely out of
the way and under control. She was free so long as she remained a prisoner;
therapy twice a week out here in the real world, or Thorazine twice a day in an
asylum. Daddy loved offering choices.

But how do I know this
is the real world?
she
wondered, standing in the middle of her kitchen, a piece of toast in one hand
and a half-empty glass of juice in the other. Dreams seem real until you wake
up, and realize you can’t do in reality what you can in dreams.
So how do
you know you won’t wake up at some moment and discover that all of this is just
a dream?

Yeah
, she thought dryly, finishing her
breakfast.
And maybe I’m really just a rabbit dreaming she’s a human.

She placed the glass in
the sink, threw her bag over her shoulder—checking first to make sure that
The
Sanity’s Edge Saloon
was safely stowed in the bottom—and left, locking the
door behind her.

“Jasper? That you?”

Ellen turned as the door
across the hall opened, a squat, black woman shuffling out upon the landing,
her hair as coarse as steel wool. She squinted through thick-framed glasses,
pulling together the sides of a faded gray sweater.

“Oh, Ellen, I’m sorry. I
thought you were Jasper.”

Rose Marie Desmond lived
with her grandson in the apartment across from hers. They shared the landing,
and sometimes exchanged mail when the postman became confused, or simply indifferent.
She was a pleasant enough neighbor, somewhere in her sixties though Ellen
thought she looked closer to seventy.

“No, I’m sorry. I haven’t
seen him.” They only ever spoke to one another on the landing, the picket fence
of urbanites, a neighborly relationship where none would exist otherwise. They
did not exchange recipes or news or the occasional cup of sugar or any of the
things that neighbors supposedly did in that black-and-white fabrication of
society’s collective, a vicarious past gleaned from forty years of
semi-literate television. They had no common ground save the landing. “I was
just on my way to work.”

“Tha’s alright. I just
worry ‘bout him, is all. He slipped out after breakfast while I was takin’ care
of bidness, ya know.”

Ellen didn’t need to ask
what “bidness” Rose Marie was talking about; she’d grown accustom to the old
woman’s frank references. Rose could comfortably discuss her bodily functions
and dysfunctions with a perfect stranger in the supermarket then cluck
indignantly at any forthright and shameless discussions of sex carried out by
the young. Ellen chalked it up to a generational thing.

“And when I was finished,
he was gone. Just
phhhht
! Gone.” She shook her head. “He’s a handful,
that boy is.”

“Rose, isn’t there
anything that…” Ellen halted. The most obvious question regarding Rose Marie’s
situation was also the most idiotically tactless. “I mean … well, has a doctor
ever said if there was anything they could do for him?”

Jasper was special; that
was what Rose Marie Desmond always said. Like her “bidness,” special was a
euphemism. Ellen was given to understand that Jasper was the equivalent of a
six-year-old; a six-year-old wearing the gangly body of a young man of
seventeen. But Jasper was more complicated then that. There were times when he
was fairly lucid and other times when he simply blabbered non-stop to anyone or
no one for hours. And there were still other times when he said nothing at all,
sometimes for days. Some form of autism or schizophrenia, Ellen guessed, though
hardly an expert. Her field was escapism …
by any means available
.

Rose Marie’s head leaned
to one side, the look of someone who has answered a tactless question so many
times that it can no longer offend, only amuse by the embarrassment of the one
who asks. “Oh, I ‘spect one has. In fact, I’m quite sure there’s a treatment of
some nature out there for him. I think I saw it once on
20/20
. Or maybe
it was
Primetime
. Well, it was one of ‘em nighttime news shows; you know
the ones I mean?”

Ellen nodded.

“But doctors cost money,
and it’s just me now. I got my Social Security and some money Norris and I
saved up before he passed on, bless him, but tha’s it. The boy’s mother gone
and run off. Livin’ like a whore, she is. A whore.”

Ellen chewed at the
inside of her lip regretfully.

“She got herself knocked
up with some no-good drug dealer she was hanging around with, and when that boy
came out, all screwed up from her being a drunk and a whore, she just left him
with me. I think to myself, well, why not? I look after him for a while, then,
when she’s dried out and better, we can look after the boy together. Only that
ain’t what happened. She jus’ up an’ left. I understand she’s living in Fort Lauderdale, or some such place. She don’t call nor write, and don’t give a shit.”

Rose Marie looked up
apologetically. “Oh, Ellen, I’m sorry. Please excuse my language. I start to
ramble on about Maggie, an’ I can get myself so worked up. But it ain’t no
concern of yours, and I’m sorry I made it so.”

“It’s okay, Rose,
really,” Ellen said, aware it was already too late to gracefully exit the
conversation.

“I just can’t imagine
leaving someone like Jasper behind?” Rose Marie pressed. “He’s such a good
boy.” Then she was shaking her head and waving off the protest that was not
coming. “I know, I know. He’s a handful. Quiet as a church mouse for days,
then, for no reason at all, he starts to babblin’ and he won’t never shut up.
But he’s a good boy. He’s polite and he’s clean. He minds me, mostly.” To that
last part, she sounded a little rueful. “I wish I could afford the therapy or
the doctors what would make him better. I know there’s smarts locked in there
somewhere. I can see it in the things he does. He’s very clever with his hands,
did you know that?” Ellen shook her head automatically, and Rose Marie pressed
on without paying any attention. “I buy him models and he assembles them just
perfectly; doesn’t even use the instructions half the time. He just looks at
it, and his fingers understand how to put it together. And they’re fine, too.
Smooth and tight and seamless. Like art. He’s clever with his hands. Re-worked
the pieces o’ one kit into some kind of plane once. Just amazing. Not sure why,
though. There weren’t nothin’ wrong with the ‘65 Mustang it was supposed to be.
But that plane sure looked fine.” Rose Marie beamed. “He’s got no head for
inventin’, but his hands can do just fantastic things when you set them to it.
Like that Rainman fella. You know the one I mean?”

Ellen nodded, not the first
time she’d heard Mrs. Desmond’s lament. But she also knew there was nothing she
could do, nothing she could even suggest. And the fact was Jasper’s condition
scared her—not him, per se, but the simple fact that you never knew.  Jasper was
a reminder of the madness that lurked just behind the shadows of her own
thoughts, inescapable and clever, stalking her, ready to take her unaware and
rip all normalcy asunder. Seeing Jasper tightened her nerves like piano wire.
Not for fear of him, but of being like him, of losing control, losing her mind,
going crazy …

… again.

She shook her head,
realizing the older woman was talking and that she hadn’t been listening; too
deep in her own thoughts and insecurities.
Reason number one not to dispense
advice
, Ellen thought reproachfully:
Anyone as fucked up as you is
wholly unqualified
. “Rose, I’m sorry, but I need to get to work. I really
can’t be late.” That was a lie, but it was the only excuse Ellen could think
up. “I’m sure Jasper will show up. I don’t think he would run off or—”

She was interrupted
mid-sentence by a paper airplane circling down from the stairs above. A
broad-winged construction, the tips craftily angled, it smoothly descended the
spiral switchbacks of the stairwell, gliding between them and down the stairs;
not skipping upon the banister or whisking against the walls, but flying as if
guided by some invisible pilot determined to navigate the four stories with
neither a hitch or wobble.