The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (7 page)

And the next room.

And the next room.

But always he found
nothing, the book a mystery just like Ellen Monroe. And that concerned him. He
was not the only one who distrusted mysteries, who found them fascinating and
frightening and obsessive. But where Dabble found the inexplicable a challenge
to be unraveled, a prize to be coveted for its rare experience, others were not
so easily enamored.

No, not by a long
stretch.

He found himself back at
the stairs down to his shop, having circled all the rooms, each in turn, and drawing
upon their unique influences, their richness or paucity.

But still he had nothing.

The universe did not
tolerate mysteries. Mankind survived in perpetual ignorance of itself and the
universe, scraping the surface by the light of a candle stub, convinced of its
mastery for the bits it unearthed, deluded into the myth of its own superiority
by the too-obvious conclusions it reached about what was always there. But it
knew nothing, not even the extent of its own ignorance. One ape rolls a stone
down a hill and calls it a wheel, and suddenly they’re indomitable.

The universe had a sense
of humor.

God might have been better
served giving hands to dolphins, and leaving the simians chattering at one
another in the trees where they belonged, flinging shit at the face of the moon
and howling at the jaguar that circled below.

Hindsight was
twenty-twenty, how well he knew.

But the universe knew
all. There weren’t realms to be explored or boundaries to be stretched. Reality
encompassed all, stretching everything to it limits long ago by virtue of its
definition. No mysteries. No riddles. Simply things in hiding that, if you circled
wide enough and long enough, would be revealed. The universe was not unbounded
possibilities, but a finely crafted, intricately interconnected piece of
clockwork; a vast, godlike machine.

Only something soft had
caught itself in the gears. The cuckoo had slipped down into the guts of the
clock. Or maybe she was a sparrow. He wasn’t sure and supposed it didn’t matter
anyway; she would be ground apart for her misstep.

But reality would not
survive; not unchanged, not uncorrupted. The finely crafted, intricately
interconnected clockwork would rip itself apart trying to grind through this
hapless interloper.

And he really did like
this reality.

It seemed a waste to kill
her, and maybe an impossibility as well—he did like Ellen Monroe very much—but
what of his reality if he didn’t?

Maybe she could be contained?

Questions, but no
answers. Whatever else, he would have to hide her until he decided. Others
would be coming for her, others with no qualms about the disposition of his
Ellen, for good or ill.

Clockwork be damned, some
simply could not abide a conundrum.

He returned to his shop
by way of the darkened stairway, crumpling the title page of
The Sanity’s
Edge Saloon
into a tight ball, and swallowing it whole. It would give him
dreams; maybe they would tell him something.

Even in Hell, the devil
knows hope.

Dr. Frederick Kohler’s
second floor office overlooked the corner bus stop.

He never realized this
before; had never actually paid much attention to the view. But every Tuesday
and Friday afternoon, between patients, he found himself staring out the
window, something he had never done before either.

Only since Ellen Monroe.

She was his last
appointment of the afternoon, 3:00 PM every Tuesday and Friday, so she could be
late if necessary, or he could keep her late if the session warranted.

Ellen was a special
case requiring special rules.

She did not come seeking
his help; she did not think she needed helping. She was, point of fact, forced
to see him as a condition of her release. But she definitely did not
want
to see him twice a week. That was her father’s idea, and he harbored no
illusions as to the man’s motivation. Kohler came well recommended, but more
important than his credentials was his location; he was well away from Gabriel
Monroe and the circles he traveled. Dr. Kohler would keep Ellen Monroe’s
embarrassment from coming back on him, a wise choice of caregiver for the
daughter of an aspiring governor, especially when she was a habitual drug-user and
a murderer; the charges might have been dismissed—the world was better off less
one junkie-pusher rapist—but the fact remained.

Frederick Kohler found
Gabriel Monroe offensive to both his professionalism and his sensibility. But
he paid the bills, and he left Frederick alone to treat Ellen as he saw fit.
Gabrielle Monroe was a patron, he the artist, and Ellen the shapeless lump of
clay in need of molding.

He turned from the
window, crossed
the room
to a large fish tank, and tapped the glass with his fingernail. The sound made
the occupants go motionless, floating still-life in their weightless world,
expectant. A natural response. He took a pinch of food, rubbing the papery
flakes between his fingers and crushing them over the water’s surface. The fish
came immediately. Tap the glass, food arrives; Pavlovian conditioning.
Manna
from heaven
, he thought.
This is what it must feel like to be God
.

Like many of his
patients, Ellen liked looking at the fish. She seemed fascinated by them. For
himself, they held no interest, but he kept them for the sake of his patients, much
as he displayed the nondescript art prints and family photos. When his patients
saw them, they relaxed; they related; they confessed. That was why he kept them.
It was strictly professional.

Of late, he had developed
a fondness for an angelfish, though. The reason why remained a mystery, but a
good psychiatrist understands there are matters beyond his ken.

Ellen, for instance, had
lost her mind.

He did not use the
expression carelessly, not some exaggerated hyperbole. She had, in a very real
sense, lost her mind. More aptly, she had locked a part of it away, closed the
door and discarded the key. There was a past there, of course. Any speculation
to the contrary was nonsense. But for one reason or another, she had closed
that entire past off and started over as if she were a character in a book, her
life beginning with page one and going forward from there, her past only an
assumption without any basis in fact.
Nonsense
. Likely trauma induced, one
too many times being revived in an ER. One too many times riding down her highs
in county lock-up. And most recently, killing her would-be rapist in a drugged
stupor before passing out. The police found her, half-naked and unconscious
beside his dead body. Later in the hospital, a misguided regimen by his
esteemed—amend that to bungling—colleague, Dr. Samuel Chaulmers, not only
reinforced her withdrawal from reality, but supplanted her past entirely with a
delusional fantasy world. Gabriel Monroe brought her to him upon her conditional
release because the only thing more damaging politically than a mentally ill,
drug-addicted family member was hiding that mentally ill, drug-addicted family
member away in an asylum.

The doctor crossed back
to the window, looked out. The sidewalk in front of the bus stop was still
empty.

To be fair, Chaulmers was
not a complete imbecile; he was just old school. He diagnosed Ellen’s habitual
use of hallucinogens as a sign of depression, and saw her lack of response to
his own regimen of prescribed medication as a call for something stronger,
something more persuasive. Electro-convulsive shock therapy fit the bill
nicely. Short-term memory loss was a side-effect, no question; but never
long-term. And it should not have induced delusions, her stories of another
world, of Jack O. Lantern and the strange cast of fairytale creatures and
fractured personalities. Chaulmers’s treatment had sent her true reality deep
into hiding, leaving this facsimile behind as a coping mechanism.

Well, he liked a
challenge. The world had damaged Ellen Monroe. Intentions aside, Chaulmers
managed only to break her a little more. It was now left to him to pick up the
pieces and put them back together.

On his
desk, a single picture in a cheap department store frame sat turned away from
his patients. It was the only one that faced him when he was at his desk. A
young girl, early teens, standing in front of a young man in a cap and gown.
His arm is draped around her neck, a little playful, a little protective. Both
are smiling. His high school graduation, the girl his cousin, Catherine; everyone
called her Cassie.

The picture caught his
eye as he looked back from the empty window view, the barren sidewalk—
where
was the bus, anyway?
There was something about it, something familiar,
déjà
vu
. Until eight weeks ago, he hadn’t looked at the picture in years. Now it
occupied his desk, his attention, his thoughts. Cassie’s eyes, even then,
looked far away, even lost.

Then, out of the corner
of his eye, he saw the bulk of the city bus approaching, heard the rumble of
the diesel engine, and let his misgivings slip away unattended.

Because that’s what you
do with things you don’t want to remember: you bury them, and try like hell to
forget.

Jasper Desmond was
preparing to fly.

He knew he couldn’t
really
fly; he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t have wings like planes or birds had wings, so he
couldn’t fly. No wings, no feathers, no tail meant you couldn’t fly. Jasper
Desmond wasn’t stupid. Gramma said so, and Gramma was never wrong.

Gramma also said he was a
good boy. She didn’t like him going up on the roof, and she didn’t like him
being out in the rain, but she said he was a good boy. And sometimes Gramma let
him go up on the roof anyway, and sometimes she sent him out in the rain for groceries,
or to pick up something from Engle’s Drugs.
You won’t melt, silly boy
,
she would tell him. And sure enough, he never had. Gramma was never wrong.

You’re a good boy, Jasper,
Gramma would say.
So clever
with your hands. You just don’t think so good
.
And Gramma was never
wrong. Thinking made his head fill up, and things spilled out. Then he would forget
things. And then he would get in trouble.

Forgetting things was what found him at Benway’s salvage yard
that afternoon. Had he remembered to tell his grandmother, she would never have
allowed it. He wasn’t supposed to go to the junkyard, to trespass inside the
fence, to be in that part of town. It was dangerous, all of it, every step of
the way.

But if he hadn’t been at Benway’s that afternoon, hadn’t
found what he did, just imagine how it would have turned out.

Imagine
.

Gramma was watching
television, drinking a glass of ginger ale and fanning herself with a magazine.
Lord, it’s hot
, she would say over and over. And it was. So he said so.
Then he said he was going to go ride his bike.

“You mind the traffic. Look
both ways before crossing the street, and only ride your bike in the park.”

“Yes, Gramma.”

“And you be back before
supper, you hear me?”

“Yes, Gramma.”

“You’re a good boy,
Jasper.”

“Yes, Gramma.”

Too many things filling
up his head; something always spilled out.

He carried his bike
downstairs to the street. Engle’s Drugs was on the way to the park. He would
stop and buy a cherry Blowpop; cherry was the best flavor in the world.

Digging in his pocket for
change, he found one of the flyers from this morning; flyers he collected off
windshields and out of mailboxes from all over the neighborhood. He had taken
them up on the roof, folded them into planes and watched them fly. All of the
flyers had the same picture, a winged contraption just right for making a
person fly.
Flights of Fancy
, it said. He could read; he wasn’t stupid.
And it sure was a fancy flying machine, yes it was. It looked a little like a
bird. Birds knew all about flying. He wished he could fly, be a bird. Gramma
said that was just make-believe. People couldn’t fly and they couldn’t be
birds. That was crazy nonsense, and he wasn’t crazy. Gramma said so.

But an airplane could
fly. He could make one like the paper airplanes he’d made, only bigger and more
like the picture. Then he could fly. Like the paper airplanes. Like a bird.

He forgot the cherry
Blowpop and Engle’s Drugs and even his grandmother’s warning to ride his bike
only in the park, and to mind traffic, and be back before supper. He was
thinking about building a plane, one like the picture, and where he could find
the parts he would need. When he thought too much, something always spilled
out.

This was how Jasper Desmond found himself at Benway’s salvage
yard that afternoon when his grandmother thought he was riding his bike in the
park.

And the world would never be the same.

Jasper leaned his bike against the junkyard fence of rusty,
corrugated sheet metal and mildewed plywood slabs wired to the chain-link
hiding everything inside from view, and topped with a triple row of barbwire.
But Jasper knew the way in. Billy Wicker showed it to him back when Billy
Wicker was his friend. He and Billy had gone to school together at first. Then
one year, Billy went to a different class. Then a different school. And
finally, Jasper and Billy weren’t friends anymore. He asked Gramma why, and she
didn’t answer him right away, but gave him a long hug. Then she said, “Because
sometimes that’s the way it is.”

But back when they were friends, Billy showed him the place
in the fence where the links had been cut and never repaired. The plywood sheet
inside could be pushed aside, giving access to a small space hidden by a triple
stack of cars, all bent and crushed and rusted nearly through, their pieces
folded together until they fused into one car, tall and malformed and dying.
Billy told him that the bums used the hole to get into the junkyard. They snuck
in, he said, and fell asleep in the old cars and drank and swore and jerked
each other off. Jasper wasn’t sure what that meant, but he laughed when Billy
said it because Billy laughed, and Billy Wicker was his friend.

Jasper Desmond walked the
edge of the fence until he found the place where the chain link had been peeled
back, the flap held open by a twisted coat hanger. He slid the plywood sheet
back just the way Billy used to all those years ago when they would sneak in
here and drink soda pop straight from the bottle and look for strange treasures
in the cast off wreckage. And just like he remembered, it opened a way that he
could crawl through, a secret doorway into the heart of the junkyard. The
rusted cars were still there: still rusting, still rotting, flaking away in
chips and peels. Eventually they would dissolve and become dust, but for now
they seemed trapped in a perpetual state of permanent decay.

He took the museum flyer
from his pocket, staring at it, concentrating on each aspect of the image, on
each line and shape. Sweat beaded upon his forehead and across his neck and
back in prickly patches. Clouds skittered across the sun, and the sweat ran down
his face to fall upon the paper. And still he concentrated on the image,
building a picture in his mind of each and every piece, each exactly like the
one in the flyer…
only bigger
. Then he would build a plane, and it would
fly. And it would be big enough to carry him, and he would fly. Gramma said he
was clever with his hands, and grandma was never wrong.

He would fly.

He started walking, the paper
gripped tightly in front of his face as though wrestling it away from a
whirlwind. He talked aloud, unaware. It was why everyone called him jibber jabber—everyone
except Gramma. Whenever he tried to think really hard, what came out of his
mouth was a discordant string of words, a tossed salad of phrases and ideas
that he was unaware of. Jibber jabber.

“Need wings, wings that
flap, flap like a bird, flap like a bird’s wings, a big bird, but not that big
bird on television, but a real big bird with big wings, big wings that flap,
gotta be big and long and light, light as a feather, birds got feathers,
feathers float on the air just like a bird, just like a bird or a plane, but a
plane’s not made of feathers, a plane’s made o’ metal. Light metal makes a
light plane, not feathers ‘cause feather’s won’t work, feathers just blow apart
and fall down, gotta gotta go up, can’t go down unless you tryin’ to land, and
I’m already on land, gotta go up and fly and need to make the wings big and
light and—”

“You aren’t supposed to
be here,” a voice said from out of the junkyard.

He stared about, seeing
no one. It was about to be a day very different from any other Jasper Desmond
had ever known.

“Over here,” the voice
said.

Jasper turned and saw what
he thought must be a broken scarecrow collapsed in the shade of a rusting
fender, its twisted straw body slowly sagging down into the earth, its shade
half-eaten by the sun. It clutched a long metal rod in one hand, sharp and a
little bent. In the other, it held one of Jasper’s paper airplanes. Not a
scarecrow, but a man splayed out in the dirt, the wide brim of his hat crooked,
revealing a single eye as bright as the summer sky. His face was cut and
swollen, the pale blue eye regarding him from a sea of shiny flesh the color of
an overripe plum. There was blood under his nose, and around his lips, and spat
out upon the ground around him in dirty patches.

“Somebody beat ya up,”
Jasper said. “Beat ya up real bad. Real bad. They beat ya up real bad. Real—”

“Yes,” the scarecrow man
interrupted. “They beat me up. Now quit gibbering and help me.”

But Jasper was not so
easily derailed. “Everyone calls me jibber jabber, but how’d you know, mistuh?
They call me jibber jabber, but that ain’t mah name. No it ain’t. My name’s
Jasper, Jasper Desmond, but no one ever calls me Jasper ‘cept for my Gramma,
and Billy, but Billy’s not mah friend no more. Everyone else calls me jibber jabber
‘cause I sometimes talk a lot, but how’d you know that mistuh, ‘cause you
don’t—”

“Shut up!” the man on the
ground screamed.

And Jasper did.

The silence rested
between them before the man gently shooed it away like an errant moth, his
voice calm and soothing,
compelling
. “Tell me what you’re doing here,
Jasper Desmond?”

“I’m building a plane.
I’m gonna fly.” And Jasper held out the much-folded flyer as proof.

The man’s visible eye
fixed upon it, glaring at the image as it flapped absently in Jasper’s grip “And
does anyone else know you are here, Jasper?”

“No, I—”

“Good.” A grin cracked
the man’s features, the expression almost a grimace through the tight, swollen
skin of his battered face. It was a smile edged with lunacy that Jasper Desmond
instinctively felt though he could not have put a name to. The wind turned
sharply colder.

Very softly, the man
said, “I am familiar with your work, Jasper Desmond.”

And the scarecrow man
held up the much-folded flyer with its picture ad for the new display down at
the museum; an ad that meant no more to Gusman Kreiger than it did to Jasper
Desmond. Only that it was a piece of paper—valuable in its own right—and that
it could fly: like a bird, or a plane, or a cloud, or a dreamer searching for
home. The two held their credentials out to one another, mute testimonials to
the parallel wavelengths each traveled upon. And there they remained, two
cabalists having demonstrated their shared secret rituals, waiting on the other’s
next move, next word, to tell them where their secrets would take them.

“But if you are to fly,
and I believe that you are, I cannot call you anything so grounded as Jasper,
or so idiotic as jibber jabber,” Kreiger continued, turning his face to reveal
his other eye, a startling green both menacing and seductive. “You are Jubjub Bird,
because only a bird can fly, and only someone who can fly can go where I—” the
man paused then reiterated, “where
you
and I need to go.”

“You wanna fly too,
Mistuh? ‘Cause I’m building a plane and I’m gonna fly and you can fly, too,
once I—”

“Stop, Jubjub Bird,” the
man said. Only this time, the man said it very quietly, and he was staring at
Jasper very closely when he said it, the two different-colored eyes locked upon
his own.

And this time Jasper did
stop. He closed his mouth and waited, mind an empty slate.

“You don’t realize it,
but you are a
sign
.”

“A sign?” Jasper echoed.

“Shhh,” the man said softly, the sound like wind over a
forgotten case of soda bottles. “You are a sign, Jubjub Bird, like a dove with
an olive branch, or a rook carrying a pastrami sandwich stolen from the local
automat. Only you are a Jubjub Bird, and you carry with you the means of
flight.”

The man slowly rose,
leaning heavily upon the crooked staff that he clutched in one gnarled hand.
Each movement, each flex of an arm, a leg, a finger seemed to cause him some
measure of pain, but he bore it with the stoic grimace of one who is accustom
to suffering only because he has known nothing else. He straightened himself
with some effort, standing before Jasper Desmond with the boy’s flyer still
held in one hand, a treasure he refused to surrender.

“Look around you, Jubjub
Bird. Do you see the means of making the plane you hold there in your hands?”

Jasper did as the man instructed,
turning all the way around to consider each mountain of refuse and castoff
flotsam. He finished his sweep of the junkyard, and turned back. “Uh-huh.”

Kreiger nodded, placing
the folded piece of paper into his pocket. “I can help you build this plane. I
know things; ways of reality you have never before dreamed. Together, you and I
will fly.”

“We’ll fly?”

“Indeed.”

“Who are you, mistuh?”

“Me?” Kreiger asked, as
if this was a question with no easy answer. “Why don’t you call me the Goose
Man. You call me the Goose Man, and I’ll call you Jubjub Bird, and together we
will fly as easily as birds and clouds and dreams before the dawn. And do you
know why?”

Jasper shook his head.

“I have that special
something right here,” the Goose Man said, touching a finger lightly to his
forehead. Then he reached over, placing his finger against Jasper’s brow. “And
you have it, too.”