The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (47 page)

But the world has changed, and you
would always know.
This
is not the way it’s supposed to be, and you know it.

“She may be right. Definitely stay
away from her; she
will
kill you given the chance, and there’s nothing I
can do to stop her. I’ll try to make her understand, but she’ll need time.”
Jack turned and walked away, suddenly very tired. “Go out back. I’ll try to
bring you something to eat later.”

He started after Ellen, then
apparently changed his mind and turned towards the diner, offering as an
afterthought, “Don’t make me regret letting you live.”

*     *     *

Kreiger sat in the furthest corner of
the boneyard, his back to a torn section of fence. To his left—within arm’s
reach—the void. Before him, he watched the world come alive, the focal lens
clutched tightly in his hand for all the good it would do.

Jack had not lied; the Café wanted
him dead.

Out in the boneyard, the monuments of
Jack’s imagination littered a field of broken glass, metal fragments, exposed
nails and shattered machines. Every step held the inherent possibility of
injury; every misstep, the guarantee of pain. The Guardian had taken up post on
the hood of a derelict Chevy, watching him, mechanical gaze unwavering. If
Kreiger moved, if he even shifted, the robot advanced a step, tightening the
gap, reducing Kreiger’s field of safety by that much more. Jack had understated
the matter of Hammerlock; had perhaps not even fully understood himself. But
Kreiger knew. He could sense the small creature’s inner workings, sniff out the
motivation that kept it watching him like a guard dog. And there were physical
signs as well, the robot different now than fifteen minutes before, their
moment of first encounter. It was more limber, impossibly flexible for a
machine of metal, gears and hydraulics. And more lethal, its exterior covered
in a slew of spikes and blades: external manifestations of its inner
malevolence. Hammerlock had inherited many things from its predecessor, not the
least of which was the gargoyle’s unwavering loyalty to Ellen Monroe. Like all
Guardians, it was a physical extension of its Caretaker, his thoughts and
desires. And clearly a part of Jack would have liked nothing more than to see
Kreiger’s head knocked free from his shoulders and cast into the great
emptiness, so much jetsam in the sea of dreams, clogging the fisher’s nets.

Hammerlock would not hesitate to kill
him the moment the opportunity presented itself.

And the Guardian was not the only
threat in the junkyard. Something hid within the dumpster, growling and
scratching at the metal; what it was, Kreiger could not guess, but he gave it a
wide berth all the same. Hulking behemoths of iron and steel, rusted robots
designed for armored combat plundered from sources for which Kreiger had no
cultural reference, kept watch on him like a wary herd. Before he arrived,
Kreiger was certain that rust and neglect had left them paralyzed, awaiting the
inevitable decay, the unstoppable slide to entropy, more junk in Jack’s
cerebral waste pile. But from the moment he set foot in the yard, they had
sprung to life, milling quietly like beasts at a watering hole, watching him,
pressing their group closer to him, pachyderms forming a protective mass.
Layers of oxidized metal shaken loose like so much savanna dust, they would not
move when he watched them—they were too clever for that. Wily hunters, they fed
his paranoia. They moved only in his distraction: when he looked away, closed
his eyes, allowed himself to blink. And when he looked at them again, they were
a little closer than a moment before. A two-legged warbot would rise up over
the scatter of derelicts and debris to watch him before sinking back below his
line of site, front portholes on the chassis—rude eyes to a kind of face—kept
him under constant watch.

It seemed an eternity he waited in
the corner of Jack’s world, waiting for the Caretaker, waiting without
blinking.

But eventually, he came.

“You may be more trouble than you’re
worth,” Jack said. “This was all I could find for you.” He extended a couple
beers still held by the plastic ring of a former six-pack. He also handed the
once-leader of the Tribe of Dust a half-empty bag of potato chips. “The Edge of
Madness is balking at your presence; an outward manifestation of my own
reticence, I suppose. Let’s face it; we didn’t part on good terms.”

The beer was warm, the chips—salt and
vinegar—stale. Kreiger consumed both ravenously. Jack sat opposite him, leaning
against the enormous, half-buried rib cage of the air whale, and waited,
sipping quietly at a cup of coffee. Hammerlock left, leaving the two of them
alone, the Caretaker and the Cast Out.

Kreiger eyed him warily while he ate,
searching for any hint as to the Caretaker’s game. For his part, Jack only
looked back evenly, drinking his coffee, his face expressionless, lost in his
own thoughts. The Cast Out wolfed down the bag of chips along with the first
can of beer, tossing the empties over the edge. He popped the tab on the
second, and took a long, deliberate drink before leaning back a little and
saying, “So Jack, you’re going to tell me why I’m here.”

“Am I?” Jack asked politely.

“You are. You will tell me why I’m
here, so that I won’t labor under the misconception that I was the one who
freed myself from your little trap—your second, if I count the crippling chair
and the bomb in the Jabberwock.”

“To be fair, what you call the second
trap you stepped into very willingly.”

“The alternative being blasted into
bits. I’d say I was driven.”

“I’d say you got what you deserved.”
Then the Caretaker made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Neither here nor
there. That was all before. You’re here now. I opened the door, and you walked
in. Welcome back to dreamland.”

“The question remains, why? Why let
me back? What do you want?”

Jack took a drink of coffee. “You
understand the layers of reality, don’t you? You know that there isn’t just one
world, one universe, one time. You know that there are infinite numbers of all
of these being created and recreated, stacked one on top of the other like the
pages of a book, each block of text describing a reality different from the one
on top of it, different from the one below it. And each book of pages is
stacked beside another and another, a library of lifetimes and realities and
timelines. This you know. It’s how you and I do what we do. How we manipulate
the reality here near the Nexus. It’s a fundamental understanding that reality
can change because it is not fixed to begin with.”

Kreiger looked at Jack and offered a
loud belch.

“Ellen doesn’t understand this,” Jack
said, unfazed. “She thinks of reality as solid and unalterable. Gravity pulls
you down. The Earth holds you up. You are born, you grow old, and you die. The
future is unreadable, the past unalterable. That is Ellen’s perception of
reality. It’s shared by almost everyone. Those who disagree join the rank and
file of the lunatic brigade, the dreamer’s posse. And a few of these rebels
find their way here in a place where a world without limitations is merely a
thought away from reality. A very directed, very controlled thought.”

And for one moment—one horrifying
moment that made the skin on Gusman Kreiger’s back shudder, his guts shrivel,
his breath catch—he saw Jack’s eyes change colors, one shimmering and blue as
ice, the other burning green.

Then Jack blinked, and everything was
as it had been before.

Only nothing was as it had been
before! Before was lost, and it would never be again. Never!

Kreiger forced out the words in a
harsh whisper. “What do you want of me, Jack?”

“How did you see yourself failing
when you wrote and rewrote this moment in your head a thousand times over in
the desert? Or did it never even occur to you that it was a possibility?”

“You want confessions, Jack?” Kreiger
asked, incredulous. “Do you think you’re worthy to hear them? Can you grant me
absolution for my sins?”

Jack smiled. “I doubt either of us
are worthy on that level. You can’t plan everything, no matter how hard you
try. There will always be things outside of your control. If you can’t or won’t
adapt, it will break itself apart, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t
hold it together. The story slips away. It all slips away. And you know the
rest.

Yes, he knew the rest.
Cast Out
.

“How many
more times do you think you would have repeated that life back there? Walked
though it all verbatim, knowing each step, knowing each word, helpless to stop
them from repeating over and over and over. Three times? Five? A dozen?”

“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re not
that good.”

Jack shrugged. “Then you’d find your
life sold off in a garage sale for a quarter, bartered at a paperback exchange,
or donated to the local Methodist lawn fete. Maybe thirty times in all. Maybe
not even that. Eventually, someone would tire of you, drop you in the trash,
and send you to a landfill, food for termites or nesting fodder for rats. But
that’s all behind you now.”

“Are you sure?”

Jack leaned back and laughed. “You
mean am I sure that it’s not going on still, that you and I aren’t just
constructs of another? No, I’m not sure I’m not a construct. And neither are
you. Maybe God wrote this all down a long time ago, and we’re all just reading
along and playing our parts. It doesn’t matter, really. We all find ourselves
in a reality, and we play it out because it’s all we have; all we know how.”

“Not all of us,” Kreiger interjected.

“No, that’s true. Some of us peeked
behind the curtain and saw the carpetbagger who calls himself wizard. How much
emptier is the world for us, knowing what we know about the infinite mutability
of reality, and our inability to affect it?”

“Ah, philosophy. If you want to achieve
Zen, Jack, I suggest a forced fast and perhaps humbling yourself. Try getting
the crap kicked out of you by a bunch of drunken zealot tertiaries unaware of
their own place in the—and by that I mean
your
—divine plan. Nothing like
coughing up bloody pieces of lung to help clarify what’s important.”

“And what’s important?”

Kreiger glared back at him. “The
ability to choose,” he answered.

Jack nodded. “Exactly. The ability to
choose. The ability not to simply be led or pushed or forced down a certain
path, but to actually choose where you will go. Anything less is the life of a
slave, of a minion, of a construct. There are too many already who mindlessly
accept their role of mediocrity. I will not be one of them anymore. I expect
you wouldn’t be either. That’s how we find the Nexus, people like you and I.”

Now it was Kreiger’s turn to quietly
stare, taking full measure of what the young writer did and did not say. “What
is it you want of me, Jack?”

Jack stared out past the junkyard to
the distant horizon a billion parsecs from anything that might have reasonably
been construed as reality. “All things in their time.”

“You know, there are those who say
that in the Book of Genesis, the Devil’s sole purpose was to force God to piss
or get off the pot. Make man a god like Himself, or cast him into the mortal
realm with the rest of the animals. But above all, end the useless complacency
of Eden.” Kreiger sighed wearily. “It was all very silly, really. Immortals
running around naked; content and ignorant. No drive. No imagination. No needs
or wants. It was incredibly boring, useless even. Paradise is overrated, and
untenable to the human condition.”

“So why do you want it back?” Jack
asked him.

“We’re not talking about me, Jack.
Look around you. You’ve recreated Neverland. This whole world, for all the
quirks and idiosyncrasies that you tell yourself make it more real and less
puerile, is just a fantasy realm of timeless immortality spared from the
necessity of change, from all responsibility, from all manner of tedium that is
the earmark of reality as you know it.  This is your Eden, Jack. Food when you
want it without all those dishes to clean. The garbage takes itself out. The
mailbox never has a bill in it. No requirement for a job, nobody to question
your decision or conflict with your plans. No laundry to clean, no toilets to
scrub, no phones to answer, no Jehovah’s witnesses ringing your doorbell. And
lest I forget the main attraction, a willing and eager Eve looking to give you
sweet lovin’ whenever you like because she’s of the mistaken impression that
the sun rises because you smile and sets because you wink. So the question is,
why let the snake into paradise?”

“I’m not partial to Judeo-Christian
stereotypes; in some religions, the snake imparts wisdom. Personally, I’ve
always thought they had their uses.”

“Which revisits the question: Why am
I here?”

“When the time comes, you’ll know.”

Kreiger leaned his head back against
the fence, stared into the brilliant, burning light of the sun, and sighed,
searching for words that were not to be found. He drained the last of the beer
from the can and flicked it over the edge where it sailed silently into the
void, and disappeared.

The silence between them grew and the
shadows shortened before Kreiger finally ended the stalemate—the day growing
too hot, the silence too insufferable. “Have you seen any dregs?”