The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (3 page)

“Jasper!” Rose Marie
shouted up the narrow stairwell. “Are you on the roof again?”

Ellen risked a glance, light
spilling upon the shadowy stairwell where the stairs opened to the roof. More
than that, she could not see.

“It’s raining out there,
you silly goose,” Rose Marie persisted. “You’ll get all wet and catch a cold.
Now you come down here right now. Least put on a coat.”

Ellen took the
opportunity to leave while Rose Marie shouted up the steps. “Jasper, are you
listening to me? Jasper?”

At the bottom of the
well, Ellen saw the paper airplane lying upon the small shag mat inside of the
door. Had it been open, the plane might have sailed right out into the street.
And from there, who knew how far it would go?

She nudged the plane
aside with her toe and stepped out. It was only a block and a half to
Dabble’s
Books
. She started off, walking briskly through the drizzle.

*     *     *

The man in the gray coat
stared after Ellen Monroe as she left. He knew where she was going; he knew her
routine intimately. She was a couple minutes late, he knew, just as he knew she
wouldn’t wear a jacket or carry an umbrella, though the rain was only just
tapering off and would certainly return. He could feel the coming storm in his knotted
hands.

Silly goose. Pride
will be your undoing, though you probably don’t know it. You hardly know
yourself at all.

He, on the other hand,
did not wear a raincoat because he did not own one. And he did not carry an
umbrella because he did not own one of those either. He had only a staff, and
it would not keep the rain from his head.

At least, not here, not
now.

But once…

Well, no use crying over
things lost …
or maybe things that never were at all
. For therein was the
rub. What was real? And how long had it been real? And, more to the point, what
was the reality before, and when was the next one coming along, that next
reality that would be better than this … or at least different? And how could
anything different not be better? The only question was when the magic bus would
arrive? When would he climb aboard the cosmic carpet ride, give his token to the
transit authority jinni, and punch out of this dead universe for good?

He pondered these
questions as he watched Ellen walk off to her nice normal job with her nice
normal boss in the middle of her nice normal life.

Only not so normal,
and not so nice.

He was about to follow,
just as he had done every day since this began—would do every day from now
until God called Ellen Monroe home—when he saw something and stopped.

There on the apartment building steps was a folded paper
airplane. Sucked through the doorway when Ellen left, it sat on the stoop like
a loyal and lovesick dog awaiting her return. He picked it up, unfolded it. The
airplane was made from a historical society flyer celebrating a new exhibit:
Flights
of Fancy: The History of Aviation
, an intricate diagram of Da Vinci’s
ornithopter etched in gray behind the words, words like the picture that
captured his attention, seized his heart, rolled over and over in his mind. He
glanced up, searching for secrets, but saw only the light rain from the dappled
sky, the paper flyer turning damp in his hand.

“I knew you would come for her,” he whispered, clutching the
paper to his chest, sheltering it from the rain. The empty staff clacked softly
against the sidewalk and his legs and hands pained him greatly, but he listened
to neither, head filled only with the penitent praises of a man found wondering
lost in the desert, and is at last called home. He did not follow Ellen that
morning as he had every other morning for the last two months. He did not need
to.

He had at last received a sign.

Chimes announced her as she
stepped inside
Serena’s Coffee Shoppe
, dress speckled with rain. Behind
the counter, a woman in a dark green apron turned her gaze just enough to
glimpse her before returning to the frothing pitcher of milk. “Good morning,
Ellen.”

“Good morning, Serena.”

A quick turn of the knob
ended the steamer’s churring, and Serena whisked the steaming pitcher over to a
paper cup of espresso, filling it up with foam. She set the cappuccino on the
counter and reached for a plastic lid. “Cinnamon, Herbert?”

“Thank you, Serena. Don’t
mind if I do.”

She had already placed
the tin shaker of cinnamon on the counter, not bothering to offer whipped cream
or shaved chocolate; she had both, but knew Herbert Patterson would have only a
sprinkle of cinnamon on his cappuccino. It was all he ever had. She knew he was
trying to cut down on sweets, fretful that as fifty grew closer than forty, the
spare tire was becoming bigger and harder to get rid of, and he didn’t like to
believe he was over the hill. She also knew that Herbert’s wife had recently
taken up step-aerobics, and was looking slimmer and fitter then she had in
fifteen years, while Herbert was only looking more worn for time spent. Serena
knew this from his daily visits, comments and remarks and half-suggested topics
he would not broach openly, but which his face gave away.

Everyone betrayed themselves.
Like books left open on a tabletop, all one had to do was glance and discover. And
Serena read them all. But her insights she kept to herself; anyone who wanted
was welcome to read for himself. Then they would know, too. And if they didn’t,
well, so what. Ignorance was the comfortable blanket most covered their heads
with at night while trying to convince themselves that the persistent creak of
floorboards downstairs was not an intruder, but just the house settling.
Information kept her from wasting time, from pursuing trivialities that
distracted from the big picture, the overall scheme, the grand design. Why offer
whipped cream or chocolate for cappuccino when the answer would always be no?
At least, until Herbert learned of his wife’s affair with her trainer from the
gym. Serena expected that when that happened, Herbert would not be in for his
usual cappuccino; cinnamon, no sugar.

But that was a while away
yet.

“Have a good morning,
Herbert.”

“You too, Serena.” He carefully
wrapped the hot cup in a paper napkin before he left, secure in his ignorance.

Serena shook her head.

“What kind of coffee do you
have this morning?” Ellen asked, preoccupied with her own thoughts.

“Cinnamon-Hazelnut,”
Serena answered.

“That sounds good. Can I
get an extra-large to go?”

“Absolutely,” Serena
said, already filling a cup. She did not mention the dark Colombian roast, or
the decaffeinated French Vanilla. After only a week of morning and afternoon
visits for coffee, Serena knew Ellen Monroe well enough to know that she didn’t
drink decaf and that she liked flavored coffees. After the first hesitant week
of meekly entering and ordering and leaving, Ellen had grown bold enough to
actually have a seat at the narrow bar that stared out the large front window.
She would read until 9:30, the same book every day, then go across the street
and knock on the door of
Dabble’s Books
for Nicholas to let her in.
Serena knew about Nicholas too, but that was quite a long story, and Ellen
would eventually learn enough of it on her own to know to stay on her guard
around him.

If not … well, she was
neither mother nor guardian to the girl. Ellen was nice enough; she had a kind
heart and a good soul; a good soul and a bad life. It was an interesting
combination, if only because it threw all predictions to the wind.

Chaos could be very
entertaining … and often very tragic.

Like most, Ellen assumed
that everyone else in the world mostly minded their own problems: not enough
time to wonder or care about others. Some part of her knew that this belief was
false on some level, but more than that, she did not let herself imagine. It
never occurred to her that the postman might read through her mail, that
cashiers snickered to one another about what she purchased, or that the garbage
man might rummage through her trash, picking out pieces of old sales receipts,
discarded junk-mail, and maybe the odd personal item: hair from her brush or a
sanitary napkin. Ellen lived in a tower of self-involvement, and tried not to
imagine anyone living otherwise. The idea was too frightening for any sane
person to dwell on. Ellen Monroe was an escape artist, slipping out of reality
the way other tradesmen slipped out of handcuffs or straitjackets. Denial, as
she saw it, was hard-wired into the survival instinct of the human species.

Unsuspecting, Ellen
dazedly followed Serena’s effortless activities, every movement a wasteless
action, everything existing not for its own sake, but for hers. Serena did not
fumble for lids or search for stir sticks that always seemed to mysteriously
run out when needed most. If she reached for something, it was at her
fingertips. If she looked for something, it was where she looked first. It did
not even seem to be a matter of meticulous organization, so much as a sense
that reality tended to
bend
for the proprietor of
Serena’s Coffee
Shoppe
. Like a spider in the middle of a web, appendages delicately holding
the lines, Serena was aware, intimately tuned in to its intricate harmonics.
She knew everything that was going on around her, and was not empowered by it
so much as
accustomed
to it.

Ellen, who more often felt like a moth tangled in that same
web, envied her.

“Is everything alright?”
Serena asked quietly.

Ellen shook her head,
forcibly clearing her thoughts. “I’m sorry. I guess my mind wandered.” She
reached into her pocket for some money, passing it across the counter and
taking the tall coffee cup and its plastic lid over to a small counter that
served as a condiment station. She started pouring in sugar and whole cream.

“That’s all right,”
Serena said, turning back to the register to ring up the sale. But she knew it
wasn’t. Ellen was in deep. How deep, Serena was not yet sure. She wasn’t even
certain if she should care.

That was one of the
questions she was waiting to find out the answer to.

*     *     *

“And here’s your change,”
Serena said politely, holding out a handful of coins that Ellen accepted a
little awkwardly. “So how are things over at Dabble’s? Read any good books
lately?”

Ellen looked up, finding
Serena’s eyes. They were the color of dark jade. Serena was beautiful in an elegant,
timeless way, a fashionable woman of indeterminate years. The way she carried
herself, the things she said and the comments she made, led Ellen to suspect
that she was in her forties. But to be honest, Serena looked to be in her
thirties. She had a kind of seriousness about her that seemed to defy youth,
but an appearance that suggested it. Her auburn hair was long and straight, her
waist tapered, her fingers thin and delicate. She had full lips that gave Ellen
the impression that she knew how to kiss passionately, but for some reason had
not done so in a long time—by choice, not circumstance. In some ways, Ellen
thought that maybe she always came back to
Serena’s Coffee Shoppe
because of Serena. Because the woman was an enigma, a mystery she could not
fathom, but which she found intriguing simply for its existence, like the
Sphinx or the statues on Easter Island. She felt no overwhelming need to know
the answer to the riddle, but found a certain comfort in knowing there were
things beyond explanation; beyond the dissecting hand of science. Serena was a
point of wonder in a jaded world.

And therein lay the
possibility of hope. Where there were things beyond explanation, there was a
way to make the impossible possible, to realize the fantastical, to make
unreality real.

Just as Jack had done.

“Actually, I’m reading a
book right now that I like,” Ellen said, rummaging suddenly in her bag for
The
Sanity’s Edge Saloon
. She realized as her fingers closed upon the spine
that her hands were trembling, her fingers gone suddenly cold. What did she
hope would happen? Did she need justification from a kindly woman at a coffee
shop, or simply vindication that she wasn’t going insane? And worse, another
facet of her brain was stricken, terrified she might let the book from her
grasp, lose it, and lose her only physical contact with her imagined past.

But she had lived enough
of her life with reckless disregard for the consequences of her actions not to
know how to ignore that screaming voice of panic. It was what sent her into one
tailspin after another as she sought out various ways of achieving that
dream-state of happiness, that Nirvana that she called the Dreamline. It had
nearly seen her commit suicide—at least, that’s what her father and Dr. Kohler
insisted. As she remembered it, she had put a screwdriver through her dealer’s
throat when he tried to rape her while tripped out on mescaline and Demerol,
killing him. That she remembered—
well, sort of
—but it was also in
The
Sanity’s Edge Saloon
, so maybe she remembered reading it from that.

Was it any wonder everyone
thought she’d gone crazy?

Serena looked over the
counter at the book in Ellen’s hands, her expression a trifle expectant, a
trifle bored. “I’m afraid I don’t read much fiction,” she remarked. “I find it
too esoteric. No real sense of the living world.”

Ellen stood there
woodenly, one hand holding out the book, the other clutching the burning hot
cup of coffee. Her face had gone slack with desperate recollections, ones that
seemed real but were supposed to be fiction, and ones that seemed invented but
were supposed to be true.
Do you remember trying to kill yourself? Do you
really? They told you all about it, but do you really remember the depression,
the attempted drug overdose? Or do they simply want you to believe that you
were taking those drugs to die, and not just to escape this reality? And why do
you believe there’s a difference?

“This one is about a kind
of complexly layered reality,” Ellen said. “I’ve read it several times, and I
keep finding different aspects to it, different … questions I hadn’t considered
before. It’s deeper than it looks.”

The woman behind the
counter nodded politely, unconvinced.

“The strangest thing is
that no one seems to know where it came from,” Ellen added quickly. “The author
doesn’t seem to exist. Neither does the publisher. And the shipper that we
received the order from has no knowledge of the book whatsoever.”

“A genuine enigma,”
Serena replied, only the subtlest intimation of condescendence. She turned
away, taking up the small frothing pitcher and placing it in a sink behind the
counter. “You should ask Nicholas. I’m sure he has some idea about where it
came from and who wrote it.”

Turning a deaf ear to the
cautionary voices in her brain, Ellen quickly added, “But he doesn’t.”

At that, Serena looked up
from the sink, the jade-dark eyes looking into Ellen’s as if trying to peer
through them like some fish-eye lens in a doorway, and decipher the goings-on
inside of her brain. “What do you mean, he doesn’t? Nicky knows everything.”

Ellen knew her boss well
enough to know that he hated being called anything but Nicholas, or Mr. Dabble.
He allowed people to call him Sir if they were unfamiliar with him, but he did
not tolerate diminutives of his name like Nick or Nicky. Even more unusual was
the now-genuine interest Serena had in the book, an interest Ellen had never
seen before in the coffee shop owner. Serena was polite, a good listener and a
pleasant sounding board. But while she occasionally offered her opinion, she
seldom showed real interest in anything. She simply went about what she was
doing, tending to her own universe.

Until now.

“I asked Mr. Dabble about
it, but he had no idea where it came from or why,” Ellen said. “He was very
interested in it. I think he thought it was simply something that slipped the
notice of the packer, or had been misidentified by some clerk at the
publishers, or even someone with the Library of Congress. But he couldn’t find
anything at all about it. I think it really bothered him. He told me to keep
the book safe, and to not let anyone know about it.”

Serena’s eyes flicked to
Ellen’s face, and the young woman felt herself blush. “I’m not exactly sure
what he meant by that. I mean, it isn’t a crime to write a book, or even to get
it published and distributed without a whole lot of fanfare. I’ve just never
seen anything like it. Underground publishing, maybe? Only it’s good enough
that it should have been published by a regular book house.”

“And Nicky knows nothing
about either the author or the story?” Serena pressed, dumbfounded by this singular
fact.

“No. Nothing.”

Serena’s hand came across
the counter, the long fingers reaching out to lightly brush the glossy cover.
It was the kind of reverent gesture afforded to one of the seven wonders of the
world; a hesitant, tremulous brush of the fingertips, as if afraid to waken a
sleeping dragon, or rouse an angry spirit, or simply wary of brazenly touching
the hem of God’s robe.