The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (15 page)

Its flight, much like its presence, went
unnoticed at the saloon.

Ellen dressed quickly and went
downstairs, combing out her wet hair as she went.
Breakfast
, she
thought, her hunger growing in leaps and bounds. She wasn’t sure what she was
in the mood for, but neither was she sure what was available, fairly certain
the latter would limit her options.

She refilled her coffee cup from the
large, brass-and-copper urn, the aroma smelling faintly of Irish cream. On
impulse, she filled a second cup, hoping to persuade Jack to join her for
breakfast. It would make for a good peace offering, and since it appeared they
were the only two people for a billion miles, it was probably in their best
interest to get along.

She took her coffee with her as she
searched out breakfast behind the bar, amused by the caffeine buzz—coffee
drinkers made laughable addicts. They pursued their highs through overpriced
espressos and cappuccinos when all they really needed to do was drop some ice
and hang on for a real ride. But the coffee tasted exceptionally good. Maybe it
was a carryover from whatever they shot her up with in the hospital; it
sometimes affected her sense of taste.

Assuming that the hospital was also
reality.

In the refrigerator she found a
pitcher of orange juice, half a stick of butter littered with toast crumbs, and
a small plastic jug of maple syrup. She looked at the unlikely collection of
staples for half a moment, then reared back to look at the jack straw
collection on the shelves under the bar. On the bottom shelf was an electric
griddle half-buried by a package of paper napkins and flexy-necked straws.
How
convenient
.

“I don’t suppose you have any pancake
mix back here, do you Jack?”

*     *     *

Jack’s efforts at writing yielded
nothing but the realization that he’d behaved stupidly; Ellen was right to
question everything around them, and he was foolish to insist on her blind
acceptance. Halfway into a pot of coffee and a bad scenario involving a hero
very much like himself, he realized this to be true. The story he was writing
also involved a beautiful woman; her interest in such a worthless character was
unbelievable. He read and reread the paragraph, liking it no better for every
revision and change of phrase. Finally, he sent it to data purgatory, that
shapeless, gray hell of stray bits of data blasted apart and scattered like
leaves before an angry, ineffectual god.

No wonder Ellen thought he was an
asshole.

He made a quick journal entry, but it
was little more than a description of Ellen. What she was like, how she looked,
the expression she wore while staring out over the Wasteland earlier, lost and
alone in the early shadows, winsome.

Better, but still mostly crap
.

Her insistence that this place wasn’t real opened a decidedly unsettling
possibility: she might be right. And he might be insane, a delusional, paranoid
schizophrenic. Maybe she wasn’t real, and this place wasn’t real. Cognitive
disassociation, a complete break with reality. Maybe everything after losing
his job was a fantasy to fill in where his breakdown took over. No Writer. No train.
No Cross-Over Station. Just crazy Jack Lantirn; he lost his job then he lost
his mind, and he’s never coming back.

But I’m not crazy. This is real. I’m real. I’m not her delusion and
she’s not mine.

Easy to say, hard to prove.

What bothered him most was that he found himself liking Ellen Monroe in
spite of her insistence that he didn’t really exist. Maybe it was because he
was alone, and maybe it was because he found her pretty in no way he could
exactly define, or maybe it was the way she seemed somehow familiar, a
nonsensical impression from a total stranger of a kindred soul.

Not that he had any business thinking
about her like that. His relationship with Jools ended barely a week ago, and
despite his bravado two nights before, he was still carrying a lot of baggage.

Besides, what interest would Ellen
possibly take in him? A mediocre analyst and a failed writer who bore a
striking resemblance to a gawky scarecrow, only less graceful. And, lest he
forget, no job (unless you counted caretaker of the Saloon), no place to live
(except the Saloon), and no solid prospects (unless the Writer’s claims about
the Saloon proved true). What could a failed dreamer offer a dream-junkie,
anyway?

“Jack?”

He turned and leaned out over the
spiral stair. Ellen was staring up at him, hair still wet, eyes bright, smile
endearing. “What?”

“Peace offering? We got off on the
wrong foot. You were trying to help, and I wasn’t being very grateful.”

“That’s okay. You didn’t say anything
that I hadn’t already considered.”

“Either way, I’m sorry.” She
swallowed, and he knew immediately that the confession was harder for her to
make than she let on. How do you maintain control when the rules are lying in
shreds on the endless white hardpan of some otherworld desert?

“I was wondering if you wanted to
have breakfast with me?” she offered. “I’m making pancakes.”

Jack got out of his chair and came
around to the stairs. “You found pancake mix?”

“It was behind the bar, just like you
said.”

He started down the stairs, already
able to smell the tantalizing aroma. He followed her to the bar where butter
sizzled on an electric skillet, and the coffee in the urn smelled like Irish
cream. They sat beside each other on the barstools, Ellen pouring and flipping
pancakes while she ate, much to Jack’s amazement. Sometimes she would turn the
pancakes over without even looking away from him, listening to him tell her a
little about himself, or the Saloon, or whatever he was saying. Once or twice
he found himself so amazed by watching her that he actually lost his train of
thought. He told her all about the last few days, what happened at his job,
meeting the Writer, leaving everything behind and coming here. By the time he
finished, they had both run out of room, two extra pancakes left behind
uneaten.

“The strangest thing about it is I
don’t even know if I want to leave this place,” Jack confessed. “In a lot of
ways, it feels right to me, like I belong here, like I’ve lived here for
years.”

“Don’t you ever want to go back?”
Ellen asked, sipping slowly at her coffee.

Jack thought about it for a moment
then asked, “Do you?”

She hesitated so long that he thought
she wouldn’t answer. Finally she said, “no, but my story’s complicated.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well mine’s not.
And I still like it better here. I can’t explain it, but there’s something
about this place. In some ways, it feels like it was made for me.”

“Or you were made for it,” she
pointed out.

To this, he had no answer.

Finally she said, “How about you
finish my tour?”

They left the dishes behind and went
back upstairs. “What’s up the stairway? The one with the sign that says
Heaven?”

“It just peters out,” he answered.
“The stairs all but disappear by the time you reach the top; I don’t think it’s
very secure. If Heaven’s to be found that way, you get there by falling off a
four-story drop and breaking your neck.”

She crept up the stair, looking
around the corner as it dwindled away into nothing before coming back. “Maybe
it’s a metaphor, heaven as an accomplishment; the way is never finished until
your death, and then it’s too late to go back. Maybe it was built by an artist
and not an architect.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I still wouldn’t trust it.”

Ellen shrugged, and started walking the rooftop on her own, leaving Jack
to mull over her observations. She had a clearer grasp on some of this than he
did.

“Is that a telescope up there?” Ellen
asked, throwing a distracted gesture towards the roof of the small writing
room. The tripod-mounted telescope looked like an antique even from here. Jack
remembered seeing it the other morning, but had forgotten about it amidst the
distraction of the phone call from the Writer. And after that, he’d lost
interest.

They used the ladder near the
bookcase to climb into the rafters and reach the trapdoor, dry hinges
protesting as they pushed open the door and climbed up on the widow’s walk. In
all directions, for as far as the eye could see, there was nothing. A line of
endless steel rails stretched from one horizon to the other, from the limitless
hardpan out across the bottomless chasm. The land was as endless and empty as
the sky. If infinity was a place, if it could take a form, this was it.

Ellen looked through the eyepiece of
the telescope, scanning the white wasteland. “There isn’t anything out there,
right? Nothing at all?”

“I suppose there might be something,” Jack said, looking about. In one
corner of the low iron railing was a metal brace trailing a copper wire down
over the shingles; for a lightning rod most likely, though he had difficulty
imaging a thunderstorm in this desert. “The Writer mentioned others; he called
them Cast Outs, the Tribe of Dust. He said they were dangerous, and they
weren’t to be trusted; that they would try to steal the Sanity’s Edge Saloon
for themselves.”

“So why’s that your problem?” she asked,
trying to focus the telescope on still more distant features of the empty
landscape. “It’s real estate; it’s not worth dying over.”

“Maybe this place is,” Jack said.
“Everything here is a reflection of our needs and wants. The Writer said that
the Saloon was a kind of Nexus, an intersection of power lines that feed
through all reality; not just to
this
universe, but to
all
universes,
all
times,
all
realities. The power here is so
malleable that it can be controlled simply by thought. Can you imagine what
some people would do for a chance at power like that? What they would do
with
power like that? I have a responsibility as the Caretaker to prevent that.”

“How do you know he was telling the truth?” she asked, still distracted
by what the telescope was showing her. “This Writer guy, I mean.”

“I don’t,” he conceded. “But he’s
been right so far. I may not be able to explain it, but it doesn’t make
anything I’ve seen any less true. This is a second chance for me. I have to
take it.”

“But you don’t know how it works,”
she said.

“What makes you say that?”

Ellen looked up at him. “Wasn’t that
what the Writer was supposed to be here for? Wasn’t he supposed to tell you how
this place worked?”

Jack looked away at the sand. “Yeah,
I guess so.”

Ellen nodded, returning her attention
to the telescope. “What do these others look like?” she asked.

“I have no idea. It’s hard to believe
anything could survive out there.”

Through the telescope, Ellen saw a
flickering speck of movement that would not stay still long enough for her to
focus on it. It could easily be nothing, but—

“I think there’s something out
there,” she said. “Take a look.”

A sudden, piercing whistle from the
distance brought Jack up short, the shrill, jagged noise overwhelming the
desert silence. Ellen shaded her eyes, scanning the wasteland for the source,
but Jack already knew.

Another train was coming.

MORE GUESTS ARRIVE

The train rammed to a stop like a
bullet smashing into an invisible wall, a blast of air sweeping over Ellen and
Jack as they stepped out upon the platform, whipping at their hair and clothes.
The passenger car door slid open, cool air escaping with a hiss. Then silence.

Jack waited, anticipation and
something like disappointment. He didn’t expect another quiet morning of
pancakes with Ellen for a long time; maybe never. The train was here; more
guests were arriving. Their time alone together was over. He told himself it
was safer this way.

A man stood in the open door wearing
a dark gray suit, a viridian tie that screamed to his sense of power, and shoes
that would have cost Jack a month’s pay—when he was still paid. He had the
robust look of a middle-aged man far from the middle of his life—at least in
his own mind—and the wherewithal to support that belief, a look that typified a
CEO, a power banker, or corporate lawyer with a tight, masculine face and a
strong physique aggressively maintained for the sole purpose of intimidation.
He scanned them and the saloon, affording neither any more time than the other,
then squared his shoulders, pulled a cell phone from his coat, and started
thumbing keys.

“Um, hi,” Jack said.

The man ignored him, holding up the
phone and turning first one way then the next. “No cell service. Or are you
jamming the signal?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Look, I don’t have all day. Is this
a money grab?” The man’s eyes shifted from side to side as if looking for
someone else.

“A what?” Jack asked.

“Money?
Comprendé
? You
abducted me for money, right? So let’s get down to business. What do you want?”

When Jack didn’t immediately respond,
the man shook his head and turned to Ellen. “So what about you, cupcake?
Sprechen
de English
? What do your people want?”

“My people don’t want anything from
you,” Ellen stated flatly.

“We didn’t kidnap you,” Jack said,
trying to sound reasonable. “You’re stuck here like the rest of us.”

“Wrong on two counts,” the
businessman said. “One, I didn’t come here on my own, so I was kidnapped, and
two, I’m nothing like you. If you don’t know what’s going on, point me to
someone who does and stop wasting my time. And if you have any pull with
whatever towel-head warlord, devil-worshipping cult, or two-bit greenmailing
gang of fuckheads you toady for, you better use it because when they find
me—and make no mistake, people will find me—I’ll make it my personal mission in
life to see both of you fast-tracked to death row. Are we clear? I have a
meeting in New York at one—” He made a show of rolling his wrist to display a
Rolex, then scowled, tapping furiously at the crystal, the hands motionless.
“Dammit!”

“I don’t think you understand,” Jack
said.

“Oh, I understand,” the man
countered, looking again to his cell phone. And again, a look of perplexity.
“How can the battery be dead? It was fine thirty seconds ago.”

“Who are you?” Ellen asked.

“Leland Quince. That you don’t know
that is how I know you’re too stupid to be the brains behind this operation.
Now be good little minions, and point me to the one who is.”

“Leland, listen—”

Leland Quince held up a finger,
stopping Jack mid-sentence. “Are we old friends, school buddies, relatives? No.
You’re just a pair of flunkies. Call me Mr. Quince, or call me
sir
.”

“
Mr. Quince
, we’re not
kidnappers,” Jack said firmly. “This isn’t a terrorist plot or an attempt at
blackmail. Whatever you were doing before you got here, I don’t know, and right
now I don’t even care. My name’s Jack. I’m the caretaker here.”

“So I’m free to go, is that it,
Jack?” Mr. Quince challenged.

“Be my guest.”

“If you’re just a caretaker, explain
to me how I got here,” Leland Quince said. “I was on board a plane, Flight 7401
out of Chicago, aisle seat, first class, nonstop to LaGuardia. How did I end up
on a train in the middle of a desert at an abandoned whistle stop? Explain
that.” His head tipped to one side, a maddening expression on his face as he
awaited answers he knew Jack didn’t have.

“Mr. Quince,” Jack said, now simply
annoyed. “I don’t know how you got here any more than I know how we got here.
Ellen arrived on the train this morning. I arrived yesterday.”

“But you just said you were the caretaker,”
the businessman countered.

“It’s my second day on the job.”

“Right,” Leland said. “And where
exactly are we?”

“The Sanity’s Edge Saloon,” Jack
said, adding “It’s not on the same line of reality as any of us are used to.”

The businessman’s expression changed
to the spent look of someone realizing he is deep in conversation with a person
now revealed to be completely and unequivocally
insane
. His face
tightened, a grimace of impotent rage as he realized all of his effort and time
had been wasted, pearls before swine.

“Are you gonna stand there all day?”
a voice from inside the car asked. “Some of us want to get off.”

Leland Quince’s face darkened, an
angry vein standing out from his neck and along his temple. He whirled back on
the speaker. “Get off?” he shrieked. “Do you have the slightest idea what’s
happening here!”

“No, but neither do you, so what’s
the difference?” A young man stepped out on the platform, jeans faded and
frayed, spattered with paint and blown out at the knees. He wore high-top sneakers
and a black T-shirt with a rock band logo Jack didn’t recognize. His hair was
sun-lightened and raggedly cut, skin golden-brown over a wiry frame. He looked
at the others on the platform then up at the sky. “Damn, it’s gonna be a hot
one today. I’m Alex.”

Jack extended a hand, and Alex shook
it. “I’m Jack. This is Ellen.”

“I’m guessing neither of you are
kidnappers.”

Jack nodded. Quince, arms folded,
frowned and shook his head.

“Good,” Alex said. “Cuz you weren’t
gonna get anything for me.”

“This isn’t about you,” Quince
snapped. “You’re incidental; bycatch. Now shut up and let me take care of
this.” Leland turned to Jack. “I need to make some calls, let people know where
I am. They’ll be looking for me by now.”

“I don’t think anyone will find you
here,” Ellen said quietly.

“I don’t think you know who you’re
dealing with,” Leland shot back. “Now let me make a call, and I’m sure we can
reach some kind of accord.”

Jack had the impression that Leland
Quince had never before heard the word no in regards to anything he wanted. In
his world, everything could be bought, bullied or negotiated. He reminded Jack
of one of the CEO’s of Stone Surety’s parent company. While touring the
facility—before anyone knew of their intent to sell off and close down the
company—his boss introduced the CEO to Jack as they passed his cubical. Jack
extended his hand and the man looked at it the way one might look at an old
cobweb, or a bug on the sidewalk. Then he walked away, a gaggle of executives
in tow. In Leland Quince’s world, some people mattered—himself—and some people
did not—everyone else.

“There is no phone,” Jack said
quietly. “No radio. No television. No newspapers. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon does
not subscribe to reality the way you think. No cell phones. No cars. No planes.
No stocks or banks, no policeman or taxis. This place is all there is, and
we’re the only ones in it.”

“Bullshit!”

“Look around if you don’t believe
me,” Jack said, only just beginning to appreciate how easy a time he had had of
convincing Ellen Monroe. “If we kidnapped you, Mr. Quince, we’re sorry. Call
the authorities and have us locked up. Feel free to go wherever you want, do
whatever you wish. Go ahead. I can’t stop you. No one can because there’s no
one around. The entire population for as far as the eye can see is standing
right here on this platform.”

And from inside the train, a little
girl of seven or eight was staring around the corner of the door at the group
on the platform. “Hi.”

“Hey, Lindsay,” Alex said, squatting
down eye-level with the little girl. “It’s okay to come out. Everybody, this is
Lindsay. Lindsay, everybody.”

She nodded and stepped forward, a
stick-waif with coltish limbs and an unruly mop of long, curly hair pulled back
by a ball cap with an
Animaniac’s
logo on the brim.

And the moment her feet cleared the
doorway, it slammed shut behind her, the train bursting forward as if fired
from a cannon. It flew out across the edge like a streak of ball lightning
arcing the sky; a flash of brilliance, then gone.

Jack stared at the empty space where
the train once stood. “I suppose I should have expected that.”

*     *     *

“What’s going on here?” the
businessman asked, voice so low that Jack wondered if he actually intended to
speak at all. He was staring across the emptiness, truly seeing it for the
first time. “And when’s the train coming back?

“I honestly don’t know,” Jack
answered, staring down the gleaming rails as they soared away across the
emptiness of the abyss, converged to a single line far in the distance, and
finally disappeared from sight. Of the train, there was no sign; the only proof
to its existence, three passengers left behind. “My guess would be when it
comes to take us home.”

“And … and when is that?” Leland
Quince asked.

“I don’t know that either. But there
are five return tickets, and now there are five of us. My guess is that
everyone who’s coming is already here. Now all I have to do is find a way to
get us back home.”

“Yeah, well this place looks better
than the dump I came from,” Alex said. “I spent my life trying to get out of
that shithole, so take your time.”

Surprised, Jack asked. “Are you
saying you don’t want to go back?”

“Hell, no!” Alex replied, pacing the
edge of the platform, eyes on his feet as if walking a tightrope. “What’s there
for me to go back to? I work for a housepainter in the valley, get shit for
pay. I got enough money to rent a shoebox with a foldaway bed and a bathroom
with bad water pressure. As far as I’m concerned, that train ride was just
fortune’s way of telling me it’s finally my time.”

“I don’t think I want to go back
either,” Lindsay said softly.

“Yeah?” Alex asked. “And why’s that,
kiddo?”

“I … I just don’t.”

The young man stopped and looked at
her. “Won’t you miss you mom and dad?”

But Lindsay was shaking her head. “I
don’t … I don’t think they’re looking for me anymore.”

“What do you mean?” Jack asked.

“I don’t know. I just don’t think
they are.”

“Christ!” Leland grumbled, staring
out across the great wasteland.

The Writer never said what to do if
some of his charges didn’t want to go back. All he said was that Jack was
supposed to write them new lives. What if they didn’t want to go?  He had
little enough reason to go back, and guessed Ellen probably felt the same way,
but Alex and Lindsay, too. Only Leland Quince seemed eager to get back, eager
to pass through the looking-glass of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon and take a second
chance.

“Lindsay,” Jack said, crouching down
awkwardly and extending his hand. “I’m Jack.”

She shook the offered hand, a child’s
handshake unaccustomed to the adult ritual. “Hi.”

“Lindsay, what do you mean, you don’t
think your parent’s are looking for you anymore?” It was an awkward question,
tactlessly phrased. Her blank stare told him so. “What, … I mean, can  you tell
me the last thing you remember before being on the train?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember
anything from before … except for the trees. They’re all around me. I’m in the
woods, I guess. I’m lying on the ground looking up at the trees, and they’re
everywhere. Nothing’s moving. I’m just lying there. But I don’t remember
anything before that. When I try to remember my mom and dad, I can’t see them.”
Her eyes were wide, her face empty as she stared inward, entranced. “Their
faces are all blurry. I don’t remember anything else besides the trees. It’s
like they’re looking down at me.”

“That’s okay, forget it,” Jack said.
He reached out and patted her arm, the gesture startling her, her gaze coming
back into focus as if from some place far away. “If you don’t want to go back,
you don’t have to. You can stay here as long as you like.”

Jack knew he’d probably lied to her.
If he understood the Writer’s instructions and what his job as the Caretaker
entailed, the one thing he could
not
do was let her stay. But would he
be able to send her somewhere else? That was the part the Writer had not
explained. Could he actually change their lives, or was he merely finishing
what was already begun?
Audience polls will determine how tonight’s story
ends.
He thought about the ticket files on the computer, the picture of the
clearing in the trees like Lindsay’s description. And Cross-Over Station. The
padded walls of an asylum. A first-class cabin aboard an airplane. And a chalk
outline in a concrete water conduit in a sun-blistered city. Perhaps a city in
the valley.