The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (50 page)

The reciprocating saw had
already lapsed into silence. The robot made no movement, offered no indication
that it had heard, or even cared. It merely waited and watched, the reciprocating
saw poised like an enormous handgun, some ludicrous weapon from a pulp comic,
exaggerated and gratuitous.

The Guardian and the Cast
Out remained that way until Jasper Desmond returned.

“I found some pudding,
Mr. Gooseman,” he said, leaning down so that his face was again level with the
ground, staring in at the wizard. “I found chocolate and tapioca. I like
chocolate. Do you like tapioca or chocolate?” As he asked the question, he
pushed the plastic cup of tapioca pudding in close to Gusman Kreiger.

“You say you like
chocolate?” Kreiger asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll take the
tapioca,” he said, extending a hand from his wrapping to take the pudding cup.
“Did you bring a spoon?”

Jasper reached into his
pocket and produced a pair of plastic spoons. Kreiger took one, and Jasper sat
down cross-legged on the sand to eat his pudding.

“I sure do like it in
there,” Jasper said. “It’s cool in there. Cool like ice cream. I bet they got
ice cream in there, too. Wadda you think? I saw they got popcorn in there, so
maybe they got ice cream. I saw some strange things in there, though. Things
what don’ belong. But it’s shady and nice in there. Shady and nice shady …”

Still tightly swathed in
carnival canvas, Kreiger wriggled into a seated position and stared at Jasper
Desmond as the boy’s brain stumbled its way through every word, every thought,
every impression that flitted through it, voiced before it could be cogitated
into anything even vaguely coherent. He took a spoonful of tapioca pudding, and
found it every bit as delicious as he imagined it would be: creamy and
vanilla-sweet, lumpy like swallowed frog’s eggs. He methodically sucked at the flavor
that lingered on the spoon while Jubjub Bird rambled. Finally he interrupted,
not waiting for a pause in the one-sided conversation because he knew there
wouldn’t be one.

“Why don’t you go inside
the café,” Kreiger suggested.

“Would that be okay?”
Jasper whispered.

“I’m sure it would be
fine,” the Cast Out replied.

Jasper started away, then
stopped only a few paces off and turned back. “Aren’t you coming inside too,
Mr. Gooseman?”

“You go on ahead; I’ll be
along eventually.”

And the Cast Out honestly
believed he was telling the truth.

The sun sets, the moon
rises. Day falls into night falls into day, a cycle as ceaseless and unchanging
as the celestial bodies that mark their passage. Even at the edge, between the
real and the imagined, its repetition is serene and timeless, as comforting as
it is consistent.

But like the unending
cycle of the sun and the moon, one eventually passing in favor of the other,
change is inevitable.

Jack sat on the back
step, enjoying the cool morning air. Silence at the edge was possible like
nowhere else. No morning commuters or joggers or early risers searching out a
newspaper or a cup of doughnut shop coffee. No rising buzz of cicadas in
non-existent trees rustling in the wind. No birds singing before breakfast, no
early bird catching the worm. In the west, the pale moon drifted towards the
distant horizon, a tarnished dime offering its last glimmer to the sun. He
drank his coffee while taking it all in, trying to remember every detail.
Across the boneyard, an edge of decay had overtaken the relics of his
imagination. Not the timeless, still-photo decay that was there before, rot
glazed over in varnish, preserved forever in its state of dying. The collapse
was progressing, subtly at first, but with increasing severity as the condition
of his dream world worsened.

Ellen was right; Kreiger
had ruined everything. But her understanding of how was wrong. The sorcerer
from the Wasteland was not the agent of destruction so much as the harbinger: a
dark-winged bird on the bust of Pallus, a raucous crow on the battle’s edge. He
was a reminder of the folly of forcing stability upon something that, by its
very nature—to its very essence—was necessarily unstable. Jack was trying to
control chaos and it was wriggling free, his efforts as useless as tightening
one’s grip on an afternoon breeze. The Cast Out was not to blame.

Kreiger would have paled
to hear him say it—ground his teeth and even learned to hate the Caretaker
anew—but Jack knew what the old wizard was in the grand scheme of things.
Kreiger was an alarm clock, the one that reminds you you’ve been dreaming, and
it’s time to wake up.

It had been three days
since Kreiger’s arrival, and the Edge of Madness had slipped into an uncomfortable
rhythm, like a clock ticking too loudly at a viewing. Ellen was still asleep;
she had not slept well the night before, sounds from the boneyard keeping her
awake. The small creaks and groans, the grate of metal on metal, wreckage falling
to the earth, was easy enough to get used to; disconcerting but passable. But
when the windmill toppled over, the blades crashing, the wood buckling in an
explosive crack, she awoke and could not fall back asleep. She roused him into
making love to her, but it was less an act of passion than desperation, a grasp
at the trappings of normalcy.

But normal did not exist
anymore. Perhaps it never truly did.

She drifted into a troubled
sleep around daybreak, and Jack slipped away so as not to disturb her. The yard
turned quiet in the small hours before dawn, as if forgetting its obsessed
self-destruction. It was a good time to sleep. Peaceful. He owed her that much.
Soon enough, the sun would rise, the day would start in earnest, and the
boneyard would fall apart a little more, grinding itself away, wearing itself
down. It resembled a field of memories less and less now, and a junkyard more
and more. It would not be long before he cared for none of it.

Gusman Kreiger was awake,
the Cast Out wrapped up in a section of carnival canvas like some mountaintop
mystic, or a mad hermit in an isolated cave. Attendant to his wisdom, the
faithful—if somewhat distracted—Jasper Desmond ferried food out to the Cast
Out, moving about the Café as easily as a shadow or a ghost …

… or a memory of
things already gone.

Somewhere within the
jumble of wrecked metal and twisted machines, rusted plates of steel and
aluminum and tin sinking lower with each passing hour like a heap of autumn
leaves settling with winter’s passage, was Hammerlock. Per Jack’s instructions,
the Guardian kept an eye on the Cast Out, but more and more Jack suspected the
task to be a wasted one. Kreiger was no longer a threat. If anything, Jack
needed this sorry excuse for a rival now more than ever, dragging the mad
wizard back from across the great void of unreason and dream.

Algernon taught him one
thing if nothing else: you don’t leave the Nexus unattended. Beyond that, the
old man’s teachings failed.

Where this went would
depend on her, he thought. Hammerlock, Kreiger, Jasper Desmond. They were all
waiting. They did not know why or for what; they only knew to wait.

Just as he was waiting;
waiting for her.

And she was waiting for
him.

And meanwhile, the world
waited for no one. Time slipped by as it will, and reality slipped by with it.
And the junkyard settled a little more. And the dust of the Wasteland drew that
much closer.

Finally, Jack got up and
started across the junkyard.

*     *     *

“Hello, Caretaker,”
Kreiger said absently, not bothering to turn around. The Cast Out was staring
out into the Wasteland, the bone-white world of dust and sand kept just beyond
the fence-line against which he was pressed.  “Rough night last night?”

Balancing a half-cup of
coffee, Jack stepped lightly upon the hood of the Impala. It was not a
difficult feat; the vehicle had sagged down upon itself like an old tire
running flat. The paint had blistered and burned white within days, ground down
to bare metal and pocked with holes. The glass was gone, the fabric of the roof
shredded and dangling like thick swatches of dead skin on a decaying carcass. The
Caretaker squatted down carefully on the remnants, crossed his legs and stared
at the Cast Out.

And he sipped his coffee.

When Kreiger did not turn
or speak, he sipped at it some more.

By the time the leader of
the Tribe of Dust spoke, Jack’s cup was nearly finished. The old wizard had his
pride; it was the hardest sin to repent.

Hate was the second.

“What brings you out
here, Caretaker?”

“There are some things we
need to talk about,” Jack said quietly. “Decisions to be made. I need to know
where you stand.”

“Your concern is
touching, but misplaced. I’ll be fine here, thank you.”

“That wasn’t going to be
my question, but I think you already knew that,” Jack said, his voice even. How
many times had he rehearsed what he was going to say? Only now, here with
Kreiger, none of that made any difference. Reality left him without a script,
words too diligently thought out, inapplicable. Kreiger knew his flaws well. It
was likely why the miserable Cast Out had begun this way.

The white wizard turned
slowly in his blanket of weathered canvas. “I suppose I do. I suppose I also
know why you’ve come here. The real question is: do you know, Caretaker? Do you
know why you’re here?”

“I think so. Where you
fled to—that world I created that you got yourself caught in—what did you think
of it?”

“Not much,” Kreiger
answered, his dual-colored eyes staring back steadily. “Too bohemian for my
tastes.”

Jack nodded. “You went in
search of Shangri-La and found a village of backwards yak herders. Instead of
showering you with praise and opening up their libraries of ancient lore, they
threw rancid yak-butter in your coffee and made you till fields for your
lodging. No naked virgins prostrate before you, no honeydew, no milk of
paradise. Lost Xanadu was still lost. None of the promises that were made; only
the savage reality of a savage world.”

Kreiger grunted something
of an affirmation, but did not answer.

“I expect you learned a
few things during your time in the wilderness?” Jack asked cautiously.

“I did,” Kreiger replied,
but would not elaborate.

“Details matter. You
understand that best when you have nothing.”

“That’s true.”

“But details are only one
half. The rest is the design, the big picture. If you can’t see it, the details
fall apart; there’s nothing for them to hang upon. But you knew that before.
The master manipulator, you could foresee outcomes and events, choices and
changes, reading the world like a fortuneteller reading the lay of the Tarot,
or the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup. You almost caught me.”

“I did catch you. You
wriggled free.”

“You only thought so. You
were blinded by the grandeur of the design, and you missed the details. You
forgot about Nail, and he saved Ellen. You neglected the stairway, and it
killed Rebreather. You misjudged Oversight, and she turned on you. But most of
all, you underestimated me. You didn’t think I could stop you.”

“You didn’t. I wanted to
escape the Wasteland, and I did.”

“But not the way you
wanted.”

“Details,” Kreiger
remarked dismissively.

Jack felt some of the old
emotion boil up in him for the sadistic, self-aggrandizing magician, always
baiting, always prodding. He was an old cyst, festering at the most inopportune
moments. But as he gazed at the old wizard—and Kreiger did look old now—he saw
the masked shame on Kreiger’s face over the admission; an admission to an
oversight that had cost him everything. And letting Jack know as much had cost
the Cast Out in a different way. It was the last shreds of his pride, the final
vestige of nerve tissue harshly plucked away by the vultures of this world,
carrion of the mind. The confession of his failings was the last barbed thorn
still caught under his skin, and it bled to pull at it.

“There’s one more thing
you need to know.”

“And what is that,
Caretaker?”

“When to let it all go.”

The two men were quiet
for a moment, each coming to terms with Jack’s last statement, watching as it
dispersed into the stillness of the morning like smoke.

“Why have you come to me,
Caretaker?” Kreiger asked finally.

“I don’t want to be here
any longer,” Jack said, drinking the last of his coffee, now cold. “I want to
go home.”

Kreiger scowled in confusion,
his silence one of genuine puzzlement. “I don’t understand.”

“I need to get on with my
life. I can’t live forever in my own head, in my own fantasy of what should be
but isn’t.” Then Jack smiled ruefully. “Well, maybe I can. But I don’t think I
want to anymore. If I do, it’s like I haven’t ever stopped running.”

Kreiger glanced up at
him, a kind of sad look on his face. It was the look of a mentor who has spent
a very long time trying to educate a pupil whom he now realizes will never be
what he thought. It was the look of someone forced to swallow the bitter,
inevitable truth of reality: it is not always what is planned. That is not to
say that the leader of the Tribe of Dust was about to let it happen without
some effort at reclaiming what could be lost.

“You won’t like it out
there in the
real
, Jack. Once you’ve been in paradise, every food is
ashes in your mouth, every drink tastes like horse piss, and everything becomes
as dust beneath your fingertips. Everything out there grows old in a heartbeat,
dies like mayflies on the Fourth of July, and cares not one bit for you for all
the while that it lives. I am not the scourge of those worlds out there at the
end of that long road, at the end of those distant rails. I am just a sad
reflection of its blackened mind, more at home there than you ever were, or
will ever be. You are an outsider there, Jack. You always were. And the
real
has little tolerance for aliens. From one who’s been back and forth, once
you’ve drunk the milk of paradise, nothing ever again tastes as sweet.”

“I’m tired of paradise,”
Jack answered gravely.

Behind them, something in
the odd block of whitewashed buildings stirred, and they both turned to look.
On the second level of the fire escape, Ellen Monroe looked across the wreckage
to the Wasteland beyond, her eyes scanning the emptiness of the open desert.
She leaned her hips against the railing, her arms locked straight, her hands
gripped tight to the metal. Even from here, Jack could see the nakedness of her
feet below the cuffs of her jeans, tendons taut as they pushed her up and out
as far as the railing would allow. Wind caught and billowed at her sleeves, the
loose front of her T-shirt, her long hair. She did not see him. She only looked
out across the empty world of too many possibilities, her eyes searching.

Jack turned back to
Kreiger. “You have a decision to make. Don’t take too long. The boneyard is
full of gateways that I have no use for. They’re already starting to collapse
on their own, but you can understand how I might not like to watch that happen.
So they may not be around all that much longer. Take care of any loose ends,
and give me your answer tomorrow morning.”

Then Jack stood up,
brushed off the seat of his jeans, and walked away. Ellen saw him and waved. He
waved back.