The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (2 page)

“I don’t want to end this with you
hating me,” she said, stepping closer, kneeling down in the chair over top of him,
straddling his lap. “Please say you won’t hate me, Jack. Please.”

He shook his head, unable to say
anything. In that moment, he concocted elaborate myths of how she would fall
back in love with him, how she would see his commitment to her and forget this
other guy, make love to him tonight, and stay with him forever, and everything
would be as it was.

She leaned down to kiss him, a deep,
aching kiss like none he had ever had before, and for a brief time, he believed
his own fiction.

The next morning, he woke alone in
the gray light of predawn, tangled in sweat-soaked sheets. Beside him was a
note left upon the pillow, very trite, very cliché. It said only:

Jack, I’m
sorry. Please don’t hate me. I will always love you.

Jools

He had forgiven her. He had promised
her he would not hate her. He had cleaned her Karma in exchange for one night
of bliss, and so she left, free to pursue her life without him.

Jack Lantirn, prince of fools.

So he wrapped himself in his writing,
retreated into his routine, and hoped that through an imitation of normalcy he
might in some way influence its return. He was the primitive stamping around
the fire, petitioning the night sky to end the plague visited upon his house
and casting chicken bones and goat’s blood into the blaze. Only this primitive
dance was called the daily grind, his
routine
. No extended lunches or
long coffee breaks; that wouldn’t have been normal. Bored at his desk, he
loaded his writing into the computer and worked on it every day, trucking it
back and forth on a thumb drive. His routine would save him from going mad,
from losing his mind, from standing up and walking the hell out of everything.
What
is keeping me here?
The routine. The routine would bring back normalcy; it
would bring back the reality he had learned to cope with.

These were the lies he made himself
believe.

He wrote a page and a half in
long-hand before heading up to the pre-fabricated, mauve walls of his cubical
where he started his day as usual, turning on his computer.

No, not
his
computer. Not
really. No more than it was
his
cubical,
his
files, or
his
reports. None of this was
his
. It was all borrowed, his privileges on
the verge or being rescinded. Sixty days, and not a day more.
Please
surrender your ID card upon exiting the premises.

He loaded the story from the thumb
drive he carried—this, at least, was his—and started typing in what he had
written in the cafeteria.

A winter storm rolled across the city, snow twisting down from the
leaden skies, eddies of wind creating cascades of great crystal helices like
strands of DNA collapsing under the onslaught of some new viral strain.

So this is the way the world goes, Andrew thought, echoing T.S. Eliot.
Andrew’s whole existence was consumed by his own needs, his own wants. Who
cared about storms and snow and everything else? Who cared at all about
anything? She had betrayed him! Betrayed him!

At the sound of approaching
footsteps, his fingers reflexively toggled a report he kept in the background
just before his supervisor poked his head around the corner. There was no one
left in Stone Surety Mortgage who cared about wasting company time—
and he
knew that, dammit!
—but habit, like fear, died a hard, slow death.

“Jeez, Jack,” Henry said. “I didn’t
expect to find you here. You must leave your place pretty early.”

Jack shrugged, confused by the
observation. “I guess.”

“I called you around seven-thirty,
but you must have left already.”

Jack nodded. Already they had traded
more words then they did on most days, and some weeks. “Why? What’s up?”

“Well, something happened last
night.” Henry’s expression became awkward. “Someone broke in and stole some
equipment.”

Jack stared, confused, as if Henry
had been speaking in tongues

“It happened after everyone left last
night,” Henry pressed on. “Video surveillance shows someone just walked in off
the street through the loading dock doors. So the company’s feeling a little …
vulnerable this morning. They want to tighten up security, keep all personnel
not involved with the transfer and shutdown of operations out of the building.
You and about thirty others who were staying on for the next few weeks are on a
list of those they’d like to have turn in their ID’s and vacate the premises,
so to speak. They’ve even locked all the doors except for the main entrance. I tried
to call you at home, tell you not to bother dressing up for work since you’d
only be coming in to collect your things.”

Jack stared back at him, his eyes
losing focus.

“Of course, this won’t affect your
payout,” Henry added quickly. “You’re still considered a full-time employee
here for the next sixty days. You can just use this time to start your job
search a little earlier, or something.”

Jack smiled appreciatively,
appropriately, betraying nothing.

“This isn’t about you, Jack. The
company just needed a blanket policy that would cover all employees
objectively. I didn’t even find out about this myself until I got in this
morning. I tried to call you, but I guess you already left. Still, there’s no
reason to stick around for the rest of the day. Hell, I’m taking a halfer
myself.” Henry smiled in an effort to make Jack feel better.

It failed.

“Well,” Henry said, the silence
turning awkward, “there are some spare boxes over by the filing cabinets you
can use for packing up any personal things.”

Jack thought he should say something;
let Henry know it was okay, and that he understood. Henry was just the
messenger. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. But it wasn’t okay,
either. Jack had not only been labeled harmless, but also worthless. Four years
of college, two years on the job, countless hours of unpaid overtime to make
sure that what needed doing got done and done right, and they were just going
to send him home like some goddamn office boy good for nothing but fetching
coffee and tacking notes to the memo board:
TODAY IS TUESDAY
.

And the worst part of it all was that
he would do it. He would pack up his desk, turn off his—
the!
—computer,
and leave. He wouldn’t steal the tape dispenser, or the stapler or even a box
of paper clips. He would simply leave.

“Jack, are you okay? You have a way
home, don’t you?”

“Yeah, sure,” Jack murmured
distantly. “Let me just shut my system down, and I’ll get out of here. I won’t
take long.”

“No need to hurry,” Henry said with a
good-natured smile.

Jack nodded, but was no longer paying
attention. There was a need, but Henry couldn’t see it. If Jack didn’t leave
and quickly, he might find himself doing something …
unpredictable
;
breaking his routine;
breaking
.

He turned back to the computer, and
made a show of saving and closing files. He ignored Henry Leeds, hoping he
would simply go away. Jack had no use for him now. He didn’t need a shoulder to
cry on, or a sounding board to help him cope. What he needed was normalcy, and
he wasn’t going to get it here.

When he turned back, his supervisor
had disappeared, quietly, as if he had never been.

What little he managed to gather in
two years, he loaded into a copier paper box: a cheap clock radio, a picture of
Jools, his
Heavy Metal
movie commemorative mug, and a stack of pens—
stolen,
but who gives a shit
, he thought fiercely. A writer needs to write, and he
needs pens to write with.

“Just sign out at the front desk,”
Henry said from the doorway of his own cubicle—larger, of course, but a prefab
cube just the same; easily torn down when the use for it ceased. Stone Surety
no longer felt like reality. It felt like Studio Lot B the day after shooting
finished on a movie set. Soon, the sets would be broken down and reassembled
for the next project—
the role of supervisor will be played by …
“You
have my number, right Jack?” Henry said. “Call me if you need anything, okay.
Good luck.”

Jack nodded and wished him the same.
It wasn’t until he unclipped his ID card and left it on the receptionist’s desk
that it hit him: his job was over; finished,
The End
in bold letters.
What he felt was something between numbness, and the feeling of being punched
in the stomach, left winded and sucking air. His signature as he signed out was
an illegible scribble, his hands still shaking as he started across the
near-empty lot.

And there he stopped, staring in
disbelief, the meager box of possessions hanging limp in one hand, as a
widening puddle of florescent green pooled beneath the front of his car like
some B-movie alien slime. He knew nothing about cars, but even he knew radiator
fluid when he saw it.

Inside Jack’s mind, the last frayed
fiber of a long rope snapped with an audible
twang
, and the line sailed
away into the darkness, taking Jack Lantirn with it.

It was not quite nine o’clock.

Jack left the box on the hood of his
car, taking the pens and mug and shoving them into his backpack. He left the
radio and the picture of Jools behind; he didn’t need either anymore.

A large crow dropped down upon the
roof of his car, a mass of straggled feathers the color of coal and hearth
stone, and bobbed its head crazily at him, an insinuating look in its tar-black
stare.
You have lost your mind.

He looked away into the field behind
Stone Surety Mortgage, and smelled the strangely familiar air, a trace of summer
flowers and dew clinging to the moist June morning, deceptively close and
fleeting, the perfume of a lover that lingers even after she has left you
asleep and alone, a note folded upon the pillow.

What’s stopping you from walking out
and never coming back? What is stopping you from calling it quits?

Nothing.

Maybe it’s time to catch the next
train out of Dodge. Don’t wonder where it’s going; it doesn’t matter, never
did. Just climb aboard.

Maybe I should.

Maybe ….

The crow on the car in the parking
lot said, “Man, you gotta take a shot.”

Jack looked up suddenly, but the bird
was already winging away, a gangly takeoff of batting black feathers. It flew
to the top of a light post, perched, and made a point of ignoring him, as if
what it had said—
that it had said anything at all
—was meant merely in
passing.

He stared up at it for a time, but
the crow did not speak again. Perhaps it never spoke at all. Perhaps he was
losing his mind.

Jack looked one last time at the pool
of green beneath his car, the beat-up, used Civic with rusting door panels and
a leaking head gasket that he had been so proud of when he bought it his second
year of college, and started walking; home was seven miles away. He did not
look back, he simply walked, pulling the car keys from his key ring and
dropping them on the asphalt. They hit with an empty clinking sound and were
forgotten.

On the light post, the crow was
pumping its head up and down in what might have been a gesture of agreement. Or
it might have been nothing at all.

It was a day like any other because,
like any other day, there has never been one like it before or since. The devil
is in the details.

*     *     *

Two miles in, the sky made good its
promise. Clouds thickened to sheets of gray slate, and Jack found himself caught
in a sudden downpour, rain soaking his drab suit and inexpressive tie, puddles
ruining his black shoes. Drenched, he escaped into a nearby coffee shop.

RASPBERRY-MOCHA LATTÉ

Café Tangier was little more than a
corner coffee nook: half a dozen barstools lined up before a narrow counter
looking out one picture window, a gaggle of tables staring out the other,
surfaces of green and black marble trimmed in brass, smoked-mirrors offering
the illusion of space where there was none. The espresso steamer hissed quietly
as Jack stood dripping in the entryway, water trickling through his hair and
down his back, making his skin itch. A rawboned man with red hair and a
smallish woman looked up from behind the counter, pleasant faces expressing
polite surprise while their only customer, an old man, sat at one of the small
tables near the door, staring at Jack over a raised cup, steam lifting gently
off the foam.

“Looks like you got yourself caught in the downpour,” the woman observed.
“Did your car break down?”

It was not an unreasonable
assumption. Why else would someone dressed in a suit and tie be out dashing in
the rain? But his reality had expanded considerably, and the world was not so
reasonable a place as he once believed.

Not that anyone else would
understand. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“Would you like a cup of coffee?
We’ve got a pot of hazelnut brewing, and the Kenyan dark roast’s already made.”

Jack was about to nod when the old
man interrupted. “I’ll take care of that if you’ll do me the favor of a little
conversation. Join me at my table?”

The round-faced woman turned to Jack,
offering him the same questioning stare the old man wore. “Uh, sure,” he said.
“Thank you.”

“Marvelous,” the old man said, and
extended a towel as white as a ream of paper bearing the logo of the Sheraton
Inns hotel chain. “Why don’t you dry yourself off?” And to the woman behind the
counter, he said, “Two raspberry-mocha lattés, please; one for me and one for
my new friend.” He seemed about to reach for his wallet when he realized he was
still holding the towel. “Go ahead, take it. It appears the rain got the better
of you. I suspect your shoes are ruined. The suit, too, probably. Were they
expensive?”

“A little, I guess,” Jack answered,
taking the towel. The man wore a white sports coat, badly faded jeans that did
not seem to fit him altogether well, and a button-down, red-and-white
candy-striped shirt. He looked like a man trying to retire and struggling with
the dress code. “But I don’t expect I’ll need them anymore, anyway.”

“No?” the old man asked curiously as
Jack sopped water from his face. “Planning a change of avocation?”

“I think my avocation planned on
changing me,” Jack remarked, pressing water from his hair with the towel. “I
want to change back.”

The man paused on his way to the table, and turned, a smile edging on his
face. “Now that is a remarkably clever answer to an otherwise ridiculous
question.” He sported a small white mustache and a ring of cottony hair around
an otherwise balding head. Small, round-framed glasses made his the face of a
southern gentleman who should have been drinking iced-tea splashed with gin,
not espressos or raspberry-mocha lattés.

“You mind if I ask why you care?”

“I’d be very surprised if you didn’t.
I’m a writer, you see. Actually, I’m
the
Writer, so stories naturally
pique my curiosity; the more unusual the better. Now when I look at you, a
young man in a wool suit—impractical attire for the first day of summer, by the
way—rushing into a coffee shop to escape the rain, I’m curious as to what makes
him do it. Then when that same young man tells me his job is changing him, and
he wants to change himself back, well, you can understand how someone like me
would naturally want to know a little more about the story.” He flashed the
same amiable smile as he sat down at his table and gestured for Jack to do the
same. “Please, tell me a little about yourself.”

The red-haired man came around the
counter with two tall lattés, the thick glass cups still steaming, the drink
buried beneath a mountain of frothed milk and whipped cream sprinkled with
ground chocolate. The Writer—
really, who calls themselves the Writer?
—thanked him, and slid one of the cups towards Jack, some of the whipped cream
already melted and running down the side. “There you are, my boy, a raspberry
mocha latté. They’re delicious, believe me.”

And against all sense or reason, Jack did. He leaned down to inhale the
aroma of chocolate-laced coffee with raspberry while warming his hand on the
sides of the cup.

“I suppose introductions are in order,” the old man said, extending his
hand. “As I mentioned, I’m the Writer. And your name?”

“Jack,” he said, reaching out to
shake the Writer’s hand.

“Good to make your acquaintance,
Jack,” the Writer said.

“Likewise,” Jack nodded

“So, Jack,” the Writer began, “how
did you find yourself to be running around in the rain on this first day of
summer wearing a wool suit that says you should already be at an office
somewhere, staring out a window and daydreaming of being someplace else? Did
you have a fight with the boss? Or chance upon a winning lottery ticket? Or
have things taken a stranger turn?”

Jack sipped cautiously at the latté,
a deliberate diversion while he considered his answer. The Writer had not lied;
it was delicious. Dark chocolate and coffee with the tart-sweet taste of
raspberry and the silky texture of whip cream, it was like a holiday truffle,
rich and decadent, evoking pleasant memories, half-real, half make-believe.
“Well,” he said, “So far this has definitely been a day like no other.”

The Writer leaned forward, inviting
him to continue.

“The company I worked for was sold
off last week. As of this morning, I am officially out of a job. And all I have
to show for it is right here.” He patted the rain-soaked backpack lightly. “And
the funny thing is there isn’t all that much. I guess two years doesn’t buy you
as much as I thought it would.”

“But you’ll be looking for another
job, surely,” the Writer observed. “A young man loses his job, it’s an
opportunity to test the field, to advance himself, get something better.
Wouldn’t you need a suit and tie for your upcoming interviews?”

“I’m not sure I want to keep doing
what I was doing. It was a job, you know, but I don’t think it’s what I was
meant for.”

“Ah, the change of avocation,” the
Writer nodded. “All these years doing something you didn’t care about, waiting
for the opportunity to go after the thing you
did
care about; just so
much wasted time. But now opportunity’s thrust upon you. So what was it you
wanted to do that you couldn’t do before?”

Jack considered the question longer
than he needed, self-conscious about admitting to his real desire; it was
impractical, even foolish. But then, where was the harm in telling a complete
stranger he would likely never see again after today? Just idle chitchat over
coffee. “What I really want to be is a writer. I always have. I just haven’t
had a lot of opportunity.”

“A noble pursuit,” the Writer
remarked. “But demanding. And difficult to get into all on your own. It can
make for a lot of lean years, sleepless nights, an empty belly, and thankless
jobs to keep up the rent.”

Jack sighed, and took a drink from
the latté. “I suppose you’re right.”

The Writer nodded thoughtfully, and
said, “Well perhaps it was fate that the rain drove you in here when it did.”

“How so?”

The Writer leaned forward, elbows on
the table, fingers knitted together. “Because I may have just the thing you
need, the proverbial answer to all of your problems and dreams. You need a job,
and it just so happens that I have a job opening to fill.”

“What does that have to do with me
wanting to be a writer?”

“Because that’s what the job
entails.”

A little voice in Jack’s head threw
out a proverb about how things that seemed too good to be true usually weren’t.
“Why would you offer me a writing job? We just met. You don’t know anything
about me.”

“Nonsense. I already know plenty
about you. You don’t have a job. You don’t have any prospects. You want to be a
writer, but you don’t know how to go about it. I’d even go so far as to wager
that you have some of your writing on you right now, just in case someone asks
to see it.” The Writer gave him an inquisitive stare.

“That’s not that big a leap,” Jack
remarked.

“No, but I’m right all the same. And
I’ll even go so far as to say that while you are carrying almost nothing with
you, you not only have some samples of your writing, you also have a pen and
some blank paper, in case inspiration hits you. Am I right?”

Jack thought on the notebook he
carried, the pack of pens he stole from Stone Surety Mortgage, the USB drive
with all of his writing projects—such as they were. “Yes. So what? It doesn’t
tell you whether I’m any good, does it?”

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t find
out about a writer by his resume, or by learning where he went to school. You
have the desire, Jack. Now you just need to find out if you can apply it. And
it just so happens, I know of just such a place where you can find out.”

“I still don’t know why you think I’d
be the right person for this job, whatever it is.”

“Because my time here is short,
Jack,” the Writer said. “I have things to do, and not a lot of time left to do
them in. I’ve gotten old, and more and more often, I’m just tired. I want to
retire. I have this place where I write; it’s perfect. There’s no place quite
so ideal in the whole world.” The Writer seemed to lose his focus for a moment,
staring intently out the window, captivated by the rain splattering against the
sidewalk. “Sorry, woolgathering. Anyway, this is the most perfect place in all
the world to write. If there is a writer in you, Jack, then this is the place
that will bring it out. On the other hand, it may simply confirm beyond all
doubt that you aren’t to be. No guarantees, you understand. It will simply let
you know one way or the other. The upside is that this could help you realize
your dream. The downside is that it might kill your dream forever. Do you
understand?”

Jack nodded. “But isn’t a dream worth
the risk?”

“Maybe,” the Writer replied. “I sense
there’s something in you, Jack—something good—looking for a second chance. Now
as it happens, I am giving up this place where I used to do all of my writing.
I’m tired of looking after it, and I don’t really need it anymore. But you
might like it, Jack. See if it makes a writer out of you.”

“What would I have to do?”

“In the next few weeks and months, as
you visit prospective employers in an endeavor to end your condition of
unemployment, will you consider a job out of state?”

Jack shrugged uncomfortably, the
question an unpleasant reminder of the many things that he was trying hard not
to consider. “I suppose.”

“Well this is no different, really. I
don’t want this place anymore, but the thing of it is, I don’t want it to go to
just anyone. It would be a simple enough matter to just hand it off to the
first one who comes along that shows an interest. But that wouldn’t be right.
It’s a good place, Jack. It’s made me very happy. I think I owe it something
when finding a replacement. A bit of care should be involved. I need to find
someone who needs it as much as I needed it, and who can in turn give it what
it needs. I’m searching for a caretaker, someone who can look after this place.
And in turn, this place will look after the caretaker. It’s a relationship of
sorts, and shouldn’t be entered into lightly.”

The Writer turned his gaze out the
window again, the downpour already passing, worn out in one grand and furious
gesture before moving on. “I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m being overly
dramatic. Chalk it up to nostalgia.”

No talk of money or responsibilities,
just the vagaries about a caretaker’s position at some place—likely out of
state—talked of in abstractions and non-specifics. But he would be a
writer
.

“Years ago,” the Writer said, “when I
was not much older than yourself, the man who made me this same offer said, ‘It
is a place where you can get everything you need, and even a few things you
want.’ I was skeptical, of course; much as I’m sure you are now. I asked him
what the catch was. He told me the catch was that I had to look after the
place. And as I found out, it can take a bit of looking after initially, until
you get to know it … and until it gets to know you. You see, this is a very
special place for dreamers like you and me, Jack. There are other dreamers like
us who know of it, and one of the responsibilities that comes with the place is
finding a proper new owner to pass the place on to. I want you.”

Jack shook his head. “But you barely
know me.”

“I know all I need to know, Jack,”
the Writer said. “I have a good sense about these things, and I think you’re
the type of person to look after this place. And in turn, the place will look
after you. It will provide you with everything you need to help you become a
real writer. No more wondering if you’re wasting your time, dreaming that a
bestseller is simply a lucky break away while you waste your life with some
unfulfilling job that does nothing more than pay the rent. This place will
answer your questions once and for all, Jack. A second chance at a fresh start.
Not such a bad deal, is it?”