“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.”
Jasper felt a tingling sensation run through his scalp, and standing there before the Goose Man, looking into his different-colored eyes and brutally beaten face, Jasper Desmond again saw the pieces of the plane he would build. Only now he saw them differently, saw the changes he needed to make, the subtle variations that would improve lift, enhance control, adjust for the pitch and yaw of inter-dimensional winds. He saw steering cables and lightweight reinforced pieces for the frame. He saw all of this, comprehended only a fraction of it, and knew only one thing with absolute certainty: if he built the machine he saw so perfectly in his mind, he would fly.
“Mistuh Goose Man, are you Jesus?”
Gusman Kreiger smiled that same horrific, broken smile he flashed earlier; it was a common misunderstanding. “Lie upon the ground, placing your cheek to the earth, and look at my feet.”
And Jasper did exactly that. A part of him knew that he shouldn’t, knew this sounded a little too much like what someone would say who wanted to touch him; touch him in a way that wasn’t right. Gramma warned him about people like that, people who wanted to touch him in certain places, or wanted him to touch them. She warned him about them the way she warned him about the bad men who sold drugs that would make him sick, or the bad ladies who would try to make him feel special, but would only take his money. She had warned him about all of these things. And as he lay upon the ground, face to one side so that he would have an excellent view of Goose Man’s feet, the shoddy, sole-worn boots bare inches from his nose, he heard his grandmother’s stern warning ring back clear as day. You be careful out there, Jasper. You be careful of bad men and women who want to give y
ou things, or take things from you, or touch your thingy. You tell them no, then you run right home. Do you understand? You run right home.
He understood. But maybe, just this once, Gramma might not be right. Not about this.
“Watch closely,” Goose Man instructed.
Not at all.
As Jasper watched, the man stretched upward, first upon the balls of his feet, and then his toes. Then even his toes left the earth.
Jasper reached out, running his hand through the space between the ground and the soles of Goose Man’s boots, nothing holding the man up but his shadow. Then he glanced up and saw Goose Man floating with his arms stretched out like a forgotten scarecrow, or Jesus dying upon the cross, and he saw the man’s different-colored eyes staring down upon him from beneath the shadow of the wide-brimmed hat. And Goose Man was smiling a familiar, frightening smile from his cracked and battered face.
“You see, I know a thing or two about flying.”
ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
Like Gusman Kreiger, Ellen also knew a thing or two about flying. She had simply forgotten.
Behind walls of glass, she watched the large, tropical fish drifting effortlessly while schools of tinier fish darted back and forth, shimmers of acid-etched chrome. An angelfish wafted gently towards a backing of artificial coral and rock. Neon-bright clowns pushed in and out of the thickened bodies of anemones, forests of tubule limbs swollen and smooth and glimmering like polished opals. A catfish wriggled amongst the layers of sapphire-colored stones at the bottom, searching, always searching. Maybe for a way out.
“You like to watch them, don’t you?”
Ellen risked a single glance away from the aquarium. “I suppose.”
She hated the fish; hated their condition, their lives spent in a glass cell, all directions closed and totally unaware. Unaware of being watched, unaware they lived to amuse others, unaware their existence was reduced to characters trapped within the confines of a story, stuck between the pages like flowers pressed in a book.
Kohler’s pen scratched the notepad on his lap, one finger rubbing gently at his lip. He didn’t believe her. Whenever he rubbed his lip, it meant he didn’t believe her. Well, fuck him. He would never understand. She was the only one who understood.
And she was crazy.
“Can we talk about Jack?” he asked.
“Why?”
“In our last session, you said he sacrificed himself to save you. Can you tell me what you meant by that?”
Whenever she spoke about Jack, it always came out like the self-indulgent rant of a born-again, the too-enthusiastic proclamations of a Baptist lay-preacher. He saved me! Healed my soul and made me live again! And I surely do love him! I love him deeply, praise God, Hallelujah! But to the rest of the world, she was merely a lunatic, something to be cured or destroyed.
Unless none of what happened was real, in which case she was delusional and paranoid, adrift in her self-aggrandizing fantasies. Eventually, the madness would consume her, and she would disappear altogether.
Either way, problem solved.
Dr. Kohler regarded her quietly from his chair, pen scratching the pad while one finger rubbed contemplatively at his bottom lip, his head occasionally dropping in a supplicating nod. It was a practiced gesture, one she had seen before; not just from him, but from other doctors, defense lawyers, and even police detectives. It was a way of reaching out, connecting: please go on. I understand you, but I am not judging you. I am another human being, and I am concerned about you. I value your feelings and thoughts and want only the best for you.
Blah-blah-blah.
For some delinquents and criminals and misunderstood nut jobs, it was the exact response they wanted, an open sounding board for their problems, their peeves, their petty foibles they worried were indicative of some deeper, more dangerous psychosis. For Ellen, the effort was wasted. She did not want to be here, and if that made her seem reluctant to achieve normalcy then so be it. This was an arrangement between her father, Dr. Kohler and an exasperated district attorney eager to cut a deal since the only dead body belonged to a drug-addicted dealer named Lenny who liked to prostitute underage girls. No one was weeping over his loss, especially since he died while trying to rape his killer. Forget she might also be slightly (or not so slightly) insane; a minor detail, hardly worth mentioning.
Or maybe that was the other reality, the one that didn’t exist. She wasn’t sure anymore.
Nothing before the Edge felt real.
For the first four weeks, Dr. Kohler repeatedly asked about the incident with Lenny. Only he called him Leonard Tucker. Not Lenny, fellow Dreamline rider, or Lenny, her connection, or even Lenny, the miserable little rat-fuck who tried to run his hands over her, but Leonard Tucker. The first time Dr. Kohler asked her about Leonard Tucker, she actually had no idea who he was talking about. He was always just Lenny, Lenny whose last moments were spent staring at her while his blood spilled out around the plastic yellow handle of the sharpened screwdriver she buried in his throat, his pants around his ankles, his eyes already dead and empty. Poor Lenny. Lenny’s death went largely unnoticed, no cause for anything more than cursory concern. After all, Ellen was not a murderer, but a victim. And as for Lenny, well, when a fish turns belly-up in the tank, you don’t call the funeral home; you scoop it out and flush it down the toilet, and write a note to yourself to stop at the pet store tomorrow for a new fish. Poor Lenny.
Her overdose—what Kohler routinely referred to as her attempted suicide—was another favorite topic at these sessions. How did she feel about it now? Did she still think about killing herself? Was she sleeping a lot, or maybe not at all? There was no answer to these questions since she had no recollection of the incident. When Dr. Kohler spoke of it, it was like he was telling her about someone else; someone she didn’t know, had never heard of, someone without relevance to her. It was like reading The Bell Jar, and thinking only that Sylvia Plath had a quirky sense of humor. But Dr. Kohler was insistent: she had overdosed.
She did remember taking hallucinogens, the infamous Dreamline—they agreed upon some salient factors—but after that, reality forked: hers went one way, everyone else went another.
Dr. Kohler claimed she was refusing to confront what happened.
Pompous jackass! Just because the rest of the world did not understand did not make her wrong.
Or did it?
Dr. Kohler stared fixedly, finger rubbing lightly against his lip, eyes flat and lingering like the dead stare of a waiting snake. The pen scratched the paper of his notepad, and Ellen wondered how long she had been silent, lost in her own thoughts.
“Would you like to talk about that?” Kohler asked.
Ellen sat back in the chair, mind scrambling backwards through her thoughts to finish something she did not recall starting. “About Jack?”
“Sure.”
“He stayed behind; made sure I escaped. I saw him. I know what he did. Now he’s living on in my dreams.”
“Like a memory?”
“More like a ghost. It’s complicated.”
“But Jack is also a character in the book, right? The Sanity’s Edge Saloon?”
“Yes, he’s in the book. But he’s also real.”
“So you said. He’s the main character of the book, though. A book he wrote, like an autobiography. And there’s only the one copy of the book? The one you have?”
“Yes.”
Kohler scribbled something on the pad. “But Jack is still appearing in your dreams?”
Ellen nodded, feeling the heat creeping up her neck and into her face. She should have known better, should have remembered the rules for dealing with Dr. Kohler; rules that protected her, protected her dreams, protected the truth—even if she was the only one who knew it. Kohler possessed a predator’s patience and camouflage, always watching, biding his time, looking for that right moment to move. He set her nerves on edge, his blank-eyed stare and lip-rubbing and nodding, his long gaps in conversation waiting
for her to fill in the holes.
And against her own better judgment, she had.
Then, like a spider laying in wait, Dr. Kohler struck. The flat expression, the rubbing of the lip, the barely concealed look of condescension that was a little pitying, a little menacing, and more than a little hungry, were all simply layers of his true face, the trolling predator, the one that hears opportunity in the pained cries of an animal caught in a jaw trap. Ellen withdrew a little further into the chair, crossed her legs a little tighter, and wondered for the umpteenth time why this session seemed to be going on forever.
“Where were you just a moment ago?” Dr. Kohler asked, voice soothing and toneless; a non-judgmental judge; an uncaring caretaker.
“What?”
“A moment ago you were staring off into space. What were you thinking of just then?”
“Umm, I was just…” Just what? Thinking how much she hated being here, hated him, wanted to leave? Thinking to herself that she was sane, and that this was a waste of time? Jack was real, and the Sanity’s Edge was real, and just because she couldn’t find the bridge back to that world didn’t make it any less real, just lost.
But like it or not, her insistence of Jack’s reality made her insane, her antics justification for Kohler’s stare just as they were justification for her father’s actions.
You were getting in his way.
For years, her only contact with her father consisted of speeches, money for bail and lawyers, and his insistence she not fuck up his political aspirations. To him and Kohler and everyone else in this world, she was a lunatic who could barely be trusted to look after herself, who would babble endlessly about phantom people who had never been real, figments from a literary landscape that she believed existed, but for which she had no proof. And no proof of something like the Sanity’s Edge Saloon meant it did not exist. Could not, never had, and never would. It was Shangri-La, lost Atlantis, Oz. It was the imagined American West or the nineteen-fifties when everything was still perfect and wholesome and right in America. It was make-believe, a byproduct of manic-depression, an overactive imagination, and a checkered history of hallucinogens, their random flashbacks tearing loose from her mind like restless haunts refusing to cross over.
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 7