The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (48 page)

Jack took a sip of coffee, and
answered. “No.”

“None?”

“No. No dregs. No Cast Outs.” Jack
sighed. He had been idly fidgeting with a small stone. He flicked it at the surrounding
chain link fence, but it went askew. The rock pinged off the chassis of a
fallen robot, a metal man like a futuristic armored samurai, its legs stripped
down to bare wires and support rods, exposing rusted pistons and neglected
gears.
It was a time of peace; they beat their swords into plowshares, and
scavenged the metal leg casings of armored war drones to make coffeepots for
the soup kitchen. But somewhere along the way, all of the elephants died
.
He knew it to be true in a reality disparate from this one. Insensible, but
true.

All realities are insensible unless
they are your own.

The robot did not move as the stone
ricocheted off his chest and out between the links, lost in the open dust of
the Wasteland. It was not like the other robots spurred into action by his
arrival. This one was as dead and forgotten as the rest of the scrapyard that
Jack called home.

“The fence came with the place,” Jack
said. “All the warbots and barbed wire came in the first few days of my
madness. Shellshock, you might call it. Everything dredged up from my memories
of before, of our battle for the Nexus, of you and the rest of the Cast Outs.”

“You turned my army to dust,” Kreiger
intoned, “and I turned your kingdom to scrap.”

Jack did not comment, apparently not
sharing Kreiger’s view on the subject. Besides, it all seemed so long ago; a
distant recollection of a storybook read a long time before, perhaps as a
child.

“Have you found any life at all in
the Wasteland?” Kreiger pressed.

“I rode out into the desert one time.
I went until I could no longer see the Café behind me. I saw a trail in the
dust that might have been the tracks of a beetle, or just as easily the trail
of a piece of windblown chaff scraping the sand. That was all there was.”

Kreiger grunted and tried to
reposition himself against the fence, joints aching. “I guess we really fucked
it up.”

Jack climbed to his feet, retrieving
the empty coffee mug. “I guess we did,” he said, and walked away.

*     *     *

The wizard stayed in the far corner
of the junkyard until the sun crested the building to fall on him with all the
fiery brilliance of God’s wrath. Then he made his way along the fence to a
carnival barker’s canvas elaborately painted with some circus sideshow oddity
called
The Maxx
. He no longer feared the war machines, inactive and
still once again. What he feared now was not so much being caught up in Jack’s
anger as Jack’s web, Jack’s world, Jack’s complacence. What he feared was
becoming a denizen of the junkyard and, like everything else in it, decaying to
dust.

He pulled the bottom of the canvas
away, determined to crawl between it and the fence for shelter … and saw
someone already there.

Jubjub Bird?

The young man was asleep on his side,
arm for a pillow, snoring softly. Kreiger shook him gently.

“Mr. Gooseman?” Jasper smiled. “It’s
you?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“We was flyin’, Mr. Gooseman. Flyin’!
Didja see?” A pause. “Course ya saw. You an’ me, we was both flyin’. Can ya
believe it? We was flyin’ jes like birds an’ planes an’ clouds. Birds an’ planes
an’ clouds. We was flyin’. Can ya believe it?”

Kreiger smiled, patting
the young man on the shoulder. “Yes Jasper, I can believe it; we were flying.
Now slide over; you’re bogarting the shade.”

Hate is powerful;
gasoline on an open flame; brilliant and fierce, dazzling and consuming.

But that power is a lie:
its cost too high, its brilliance fleeting.

Ellen felt the courage
run out of her the moment she turned away. She could have killed Kreiger within
those first seconds; Jack could not have stopped her;
nothing
could have
stopped her. The hatred would allow her that, allow her
anything
. She
could have severed Kreiger’s head in a single blow, and suffered not one ounce
of remorse as his dying heart—
assuming he had one
—pumped the last of his
blood—
or poison or acid or whatever filled his demon’s veins
—out the
gory stump in an obscene fountain, one more piece of wreckage on the beach of
this vast and wondrous shore at the edge of all reality. Hate—rooted in anger
and grief—would allow that. Let the blood splash hot against her bare skin,
splatter her ankles and slick the soles of her feet. She would not care. The
hate offered resolution without repercussion. Yes, she could have killed
Kreiger in those first few seconds. She could have done what Jack was afraid to
do.

But he stopped her—so
damnably calm she felt the urge to strike him instead—and just that quick, the
hatred used her up, burned her out, left her hollow and cold, a shell weakly
constructed of sadness and fear.

Some last scrap of anger
towards Jack—
strange that he should have kept it kindled
—let her turn away
before her emotions betrayed her.

And then it burned out
entirely, leaving her in darkness, cold and alone, heart beating so loud she
was deaf to the world. She did not hear anything Jack might have said, only the
slam of blood through her veins, ringing in her ears. Her hands were shaking,
fingers ice-cold. She tried to make fists, but could not make the muscles obey.

She propelled herself towards
the stairs, but that was as far as she got. She stumbled sharply against the
metal steps, and collapsed upon the cement, eyes closed, forcing back tears.
Pride
still counted for something, didn’t it?
She kept her lips tight, refusing
to let Jack hear her pain, come to comfort her, see her like this.

Why did you destroy
everything we had? Why did you allow him to come here?

Everything was ruined,
and Jack let it happen; as if he’d known all along the end was coming.

Why didn’t you tell
me?

A little coal for her
anger, the recrimination gave her enough strength to ascend and find something
to wear. The walkway seemed narrower, the loft precarious. Until this moment,
it never occurred to her that a simple misstep might kill one of them. Before
this morning, this world had not felt dangerous.

In the blink of an eye,
everything changed.

She found her jeans right
where she dropped them the night before, so carefree, secure in Jack’s arms. Lost
souls re-united, wild animals entwined, driven by passion. No secrets, just two
spirits coming together, completely open. That was what she believed.

Apparently, she was wrong.
And Kreiger proved it.

The sorcerer’s eyes—his
strange, shapeshifter’s eyes—made her feel naked; so much worse than Dr.
Kohler. Kohler saw her as a doll, projecting his dark fantasies upon her, but
be had never really seen
her
, only what he wanted to see of her. She
could deceive him, distract him, hide things from him. Kohler wouldn’t dare look
below the surface lest scrutiny shatter the dream, his self-indulgent world
collapsing under its own weight, a castle of matchsticks, a house of cards. But
Kreiger saw deeper. She knew it the moment she saw his eyes, one blue, one
green, and it brought back every encounter with the deranged sorcerer at the
Sanity’s Edge Saloon. He saw through her like glass, every thought, every want,
every flaw. She fell open before him like a book, and she hated him for it.

And she hated Jack for
letting him come back, for letting him ruin everything.

And she even hated
herself for feeling this way.

There is no place for
hate in paradise. Paradise is lost, as unrecoverable as the past, gone like yesterday.

Ellen stared around the
loft, holding her right sneaker, the left misplaced. It likely fell and bounced
away as a carelessly thrown shoe is apt to, and was now lost somewhere in the
discord of Jack’s garage. Sufficiently distracted last night, the matter of a
missing shoe seemed trivial. But in the light of day, it was important again.

Everything had changed.

Ellen stormed about the
garage, mad at Jack for deceiving her; mad at herself for being deceived. Once
upon a time, she relied on no one, wanted nothing but the freedom to fly the
Dreamline; an existence perfectly contained if somewhat trite and
self-destructive.

Then Jack came into her
life and changed everything, and there was no going back. And even if she
could, she no longer wanted to.

But Jack was keeping secrets
from her. The realization hurt, and that made her angry.

And anger had no place in
paradise either.

The exact translation of
utopia
is nowhere. Paradise is no different.

The floor was cold
against her feet as she searched the empty corners of the too-tidy garage. Not
the workplace of a mechanic, but of a fledgling artist who felt the need to
keep the floor swept, his things put away, tools at right angles, work hidden
under a canvas. The workplace of an artist uncomfortable with being an artist,
afraid someone will discover his aspirations and denounce him.

Of course, there was no
sign of her sneaker. Her eyes traveled the walls to the workbench beside the
Gordian knot of piping and waste-lines surrounding the hot water tank. It had
to be over there somewhere; a shoe can only bounce and roll so far, and there
was nowhere else that it could be.

Unless their time here at
the Edge was at an end, and things were disappearing like before, those final
days at the saloon.

But Jack said things
were different this time.

Maybe not so different
after all. Maybe their time here really
was
at an end, different or not.
All things pass away in the end.

Ellen scanned the
workbench, but her missing sneaker was not there, not lying askew, not propped on
a box of assorted nails, its laces snagged on a tool hook. She got down on her
hands and knees, looking underneath at a couple dozen cans of mismatched paint,
wondering if maybe it had fallen behind them. She pulled out one can after
another, dragging each out and shoving it aside to see behind. But the more she
pulled out, the more apparent it became that her sneaker would not be found.

In a world where reality
was reduced to a single greasy spoon and an abandoned garage in the middle of
absolutely nothing but bone-white dust, how does one lose a shoe?

The stress a person will
cope with, the volume that can be endured, is made all the more incredible by
the sheer banality of the last straw, and how utterly insignificant the
breaking strain can seem to those outside, to those who do not have to endure.
Something as simple as spilled milk, a forgotten lunch, misplaced car keys, or
a lost shoe.

The paint cans were no
longer being pushed out of the way; they were being
thrown
. One can lost
its lid and ran a swath of white straight to the wall where it splattered
against the cinderblocks. A can of black paint crashed beside it, spreading
lines across the white like scrawls on a page. More cans thudded and rolled
behind her, leaving odd tracks as they slid and rolled through the puddles of
paint, the smooth concrete offering no resistance.

And then there were no
more cans. She pulled the last one from under the workbench, as though a
sneaker—that final straw, the target of her misdirected rage—could hide itself
behind a single can of sunrise orange. She stood up, knees aching, face red, on
the verge of tears. Once again, the anger was exhausted, leaving her empty and
sad. No more stoking the furnace; she was spent down to the ashes.
All this
over a goddamn shoe
, she thought, knowing full well the sneaker had nothing
to do with it.

She was still angry, but
she could forgive him. Better that than lose him.

Out of the corner of her
eye she saw Hammerlock standing a few paces away, staring with his
expressionless face, head tilted slightly as he held something out to her.

Her left shoe.

Ellen reached for the offering,
taking it from him as she leaned towards the robot and placed her forehead to
his. “Thank you,” she murmured. And she finally allowed herself to cry.

In time, she would
forgive him.
Better that than lose him.

*     *     *

It was almost noon before Jack went looking for Ellen. He
wanted to give her some time to herself, time to remember he had protected her
and always would. But mostly he wanted to give her enough time to stop hating
him.

All good reasons, he told himself. And the more he told
himself, the more he believed it, truth through repetition.

Mostly though, he was
afraid. There were things he needed to explain, things he knew. Things Ellen wouldn’t
like.

His greatest fear was
that she might interpret these things as a distance between them she could not
overcome, a sign of inevitable disparity. One shattered expectation opened the
house of glass to closer scrutiny, secrets like rodents; where there was one,
there were surely others.

How comforting these
idioms will be for you after she leaves.

This was not about
before; this was about now. And tomorrow. This was about the future,
and Ellen was only just beginning to
discover her place in it; a place he’d neglected to tell her about.

You could lose her.

So he wandered aimlessly
amidst the debris, wasting time examining things already examined, elements of
his junkyard once cherished, now forgotten, that served only to delay the
inevitable.

Jack eventually climbed
the back stairs, and up the rung ladder to the rooftop over the garage. There
he
found Ellen seated on
the narrow, pebbled roof over the Scarlet Cinema, legs dangling over the edge
as she stared out past the diner into the emptiness beyond. Ellen always liked
high places. Hammerlock sat beside her, having adopted her forlorn posture, her
empty stare, and together they looked out into the nothingness, their thoughts
a mystery.
I should never have tried to bring him back,
he thought
.
It will only hurt more when I leave.

“You knew he was coming,
didn’t you?” Ellen asked, not looking away.

“I knew he would eventually
find his way here.”

“That’s the same as
saying you knew.”

He didn’t think that was
true, but knew better than to argue the point. He sat down beside her on the
edge of the wall … but not too close. “Some things are inevitable,” he said
cautiously. “Even here. A part of me hoped Kreiger would lose himself in the
madness of the Edge, become lost in the clouds—lose his way or his mind or just
his will—and fall. But Kreiger is a hard one to dismiss. He’s an exceptional
sorcerer—”

“He’s psychotic.”

“Yes.”
And so much more,
so much worse than you could ever imagine.
“But he knows more about the
Nexus than anyone. He knows how to find it, and how to find his way back when
lost. The world I sent you to, the one that kept you safe, is where he hid to
avoid being destroyed along with the Saloon. I let that world punish him. I let
it remind him that he lost the Nexus on his own, and that he can never take it
away from me—not now, not ever. But there was always a way out, so that you could
find your way back. I left the door open, and when you came through, he
followed. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I hoped we would have more time. I
thought if you knew, you would have been miserable waiting for him, and that’s
not what this place is about.”

“Then what’s this place
about?” she asked. Beneath her placid expression, the mask she wore to spite
him, Jack could see the heaviness in her eyes, tracks of tears recently smoothed
away for the sake of pride. Their relationship was born out of chance and
circumstance, an unexpected encounter, mutual need, mutual attraction, a
dangerous codependence, a shared reality from which all others were excluded.
A
beginning like so many beginnings.
Only much later, after she left and he
was alone in a barren world, did he understand the true nature of their shared
soul, and how much she meant to him.

He had damaged something
between them; how badly, time would tell.

“In a lot of ways—all the
ways that count—this place is whatever you need it to be. Whatever you want it
to be. I know how it sounds—the natural state determined not by physics and
nature, but necessity and preconception—but it’s true. This place is whatever
we need, whatever we want. No more and no less.”