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

by Mark Reynolds

  Um … because you’re crazy.

  Entering her apartment, she went straight to the shower, eager to wash away the smell of the bus ride and the inventory and her session with Dr. Kohler. He knew her too well, what buttons to push and how hard. Serena was right about one thing; he was dangerous and untrustworthy and her best interests were not his.

  Spoken like a true delusional. A professional tries to help you, but you see only treachery and deceit. You’re paranoid, you know that.

  She stepped from the shower, wrapped herself in a towel, and left the day’s clothes behind in a pile. Between the rain and the inventory and Kohler, they were all in desperate need of washing. She detoured through the kitchen, put some water on to boil, and headed to the bedroom where she found a T-shirt and some jeans to wear. She finger-combed her hair, not overly concerned with the results; she probably wouldn’t be staying awake long, anyway.

  It wasn’t until the constant din of noise on the roof stopped that she became aware of it in the first place, looking up as the world turned suddenly quiet, the only sound the murmuring of water in the tea kettle.

  One thing you learned in an apartment was how to tune out others around you; how to transform conversations heard through heating vents and thin walls into white noise; how to disregard voices, and the comings and goings of strangers. A skill developed over time, the gradual failure to notice the things around you. You became a sleeper moving though a dream, nothing shocking you because nothing was really shocking; just a strange twist on a novel television plot. But sometimes you woke up. Sometimes you noticed things because they were gone, the white noise turned off, dead silence, an uncomfortable void begging to be filled, eager to suck someone into its maw and make them the source of another’s white noise. And sometimes, the silence foretold of things to come, the calm before the storm.

  “Jasper, I told you to come down here,” Rose Marie shouted from their shared landing, picking up where she and Ellen left off that morning. “That means now, mister. Come on.” Ellen heard footsteps on the stairs. “You been up there all afternoon and all evening, too,” Rose Marie continued; what protest was offered, if any, Ellen was unaware. “Now I want you to get washed up and get ready for bed, and that’s final.”

  She tuned them out again as the door across the hall from her own slammed. What could Jasper possibly have been doing on the rooftop all that time? she wondered. Was he the source of the noise before it stopped?

  The whistle on the kettle let out a worrisome mewling that quickly built in volume and pitch. Ellen scooped the teapot off the burner to silence it, and poured boiling water over a spoonful of the dry, powdery leaves and herbs that was Serena’s special blend. She retrieved Jack’s book from her bag and was about to curl up with it on the sofa for the umpteenth time while the tea steeped when something else occurred to her; something she had noticed and dismissed in her eagerness to get home, to get herself inside and safely away from the world at large.

  Where do you think those wires go? Jack’s senseless question, a moment of dream without context that she dismissed as meaningless.

  Only now she knew!

  Ellen took the book along with her tea to the hallway, looking at the loosely woven rope of extension cords wending their way up the switchback of stairs starting in the basement—she had seen that when she came in—and proceeding straight up and out of sight. She could see a thin slice of orange sunlight in the blackness at the top of the stairs; someone had left the door to the roof open.

  What had Jasper been doing that he needed so many extension cords, and what was the connection to her dream? Where do you think those wires go?

  Behind her, the door to her apartment was closed but not locked. Outside, a pair of derelicts paced the gathering shadows. White noise; someone else’s problem, not mine; forget it.

  Ellen pushed open the door at the top of the stairs and stepped out on the roof, the pebbly surface hard against her bare feet. She followed the twist of yellow and orange electrical cords towards the back edge of the building facing the gorge and the river far below. Half a dozen tools lay where they were dropped, plugged in and ready to resume work on Jasper’s project.

  And what a project it was.

  Rose Marie boasted that Jasper was clever with his hands. It seemed the kind of charitable remark a grandmother would make, and Ellen never placed much stock in it. Apparently, she should have.

  Jasper’s project had an almost organic appearance, the combined elements of an ultra-light aircraft with parts that were the sole property of creatures born naturally to flight. A thin skeleton of lightweight metal tubing connected great bat-like wings and a long, streamlined tail. Canvas in need of stitching lay draped over the skeletal metal like folds of skin, a fallen pterodactyl or a dead condor, frozen in its moment of takeoff and left behind on the roof of an apartment building to slowly decay. At the front of the beast was the sparse cockpit, nothing more than a bicycle seat and a backrest set just ahead of the great wings, a pair of foot pedals and hand levers—both cannibalized from a bicycle—the only controls to speak of. Loose cables and bracing wires littered the area around the motionless flyer like fallen gristle from a lifeless creature gradually rotting down.

  All around lay the forgotten and discarded remnants of Jasper’s master creation. Ellen traced the shape with her eyes, trying to see ahead to the finished work. She thought the flyer would actually pump its wings when it was done, relying not upon a manmade propeller or jet engine, but the seemingly simple and bewilderingly complex method of aerodynamics employed by birds for millions of years. She also felt certain that it would work. This thing would fly, anywhere, any distance, the sky’s the limit. She was as certain of it as she was of Jack Lantirn and the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. It had the detailed craftsmanship of a dreamer lost to his cause; an elegance, even in its unfinished state, that Jack’s writing had; a quality driven by desperation and dreams and a strangely undying belief the dreamer had in his own abilities.

  Ellen placed the book down upon the roof’s edge along with the cup of still-steaming tea, and turned her attention to the flyer. Amidst the tools scattered pell-mell beside castoff fragments of tubing, cable, wire and canvas, Ellen found a black magic marker. Jasper used it for drawing lines upon the canvas, hash marks for cutting and stitching. She walked back to the flyer’s tail where the narrow backbone of the plane widened abruptly, both the broad flat tail and the vertical rudder composed of splines webbed over by the dull canvas to resemble a fish’s tail. It reminded Ellen of a Yes album cover, of childhood fantasy posters of air whales and flying fish and Jules Verne-type crafts that resembled aquatic animals more than machines.

  Ellen wrote a single word on the broad surface of the rudder with the magic maker: DREAMLINE.

  She stepped back to admire her handiwork, amused by the suggestion of a relationship that probably did not exist. Aren’t you the clever girl. A powerful word, Dreamline, her general descriptor for all the drugs she once used, all the psychoactive hallucinogens she took to escape this reality. She picked it up from a song, though she couldn’t exactly remember who did it. The drugs were like tickets, tickets out of reality, tickets aboard the Dreamline. And it was on board the Dreamline that Ellen had first been transported to the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

  And now she was ascribing those characteristics to a troubled youth’s lunatic sculpture being built upon the rooftop of her apartment building with pieces scavenged from a junkyard.

  She tossed the marker back into the scatter of tools and parts where it quickly disguised itself, just another lost detail in the sea. Then she retrieved her tea and the book, carrying them to the wall of the stair’s outbuilding and sitting down against the brick, still warm from the day’s heat. She traded her gaze between the faded sunset that had dimmed to mist-shrouded reds and purples, and the single word she had written on the tail of Jasper’s flyer.

  Dreamline.

  Everything contradicted itself: good and bad, rain and s
un, mad and sane. Reality, it seemed, was deliberately breaking down in front of her, mimicking her confusion, her indecision.

  Maybe you’re the one breaking down. Maybe you’re projecting. What makes more sense: all of reality breaking down around you, or you breaking down in a sea of normalcy?

  Maybe Dr. Kohler was right.

  She took a drink of Serena’s tea, savoring the taste as she opened the book to the part about Jack’s and her first morning together when they shared each other’s company over a breakfast of pancakes and hazelnut-flavored coffee. It was the summation of their entire relationship: a pleasant interlude in the midst of overwhelming chaos. She started reading, drinking Serena’s tea so it wouldn’t cool before she finished it.

  Half of the cup still remained as sleep stole over her with the ease of night. The book slipped from her hands, riffling closed upon the gravel roof as the day caught up to her, and she surrendered, head leaning back against the still-warm bricks, eyes slipping closed. Only for a moment, she thought. Only a moment.

  And then she was asleep.

  * * *

  Those same rooftop shadows quietly disgorged Gusman Kreiger from the shallow folds in reality where he hid. He emerged suddenly and quietly, a stir in the darkness that took shape in the imagination and was actualized; a shuddering upon the dream plane rooted in nightmares.

  It was coming back to him. The power. The worlds were drawing closer together, would pass in fact, and soon. And when they did, someone who knew how, someone who knew the secret way of dreamers, might cross the distance between them. He had done it once before in that reality of so long ago. He could do it again.

  Probably.

  Unless this is all a lie, an ominous voice in his head thought. Unless Jack is dead or insane, and Ellen Monroe abandoned to her fate here in this godforsaken reality where even the dust is exhausted by its own existence. And if that’s true, then your cart’s hitched to a dead horse that you’re whipping and screaming at while it does nothing more useful than gather flies. You might have been mistaken about the signs, Crazy Moses, Mumbling Shepherd. Yes, you might have at that. And if you are mistaken, Goose Man, if Jack really is dead or beyond helping sweet, little Ellen Monroe, then you are doomed, supremely and absolutely fucked.

  No! He wasn’t wrong! Jack had bested him, and if Jack could beat him, Jack could beat the Nexus. And Jack would never forget Ellen, and he would never abandon her. And so long as that was true, there was still a way out. There had to be. There simply had to be.

  He had seen the signs.

  Kreiger crossed the roof like wind in the desert, a silent wraith standing over Ellen, staring intently, watching her eyes move and dart beneath closed lids.

  She was dreaming.

  “Don’t tell him I’m here,” he whispered, brushing a stray lock of hair from her face. “Let’s keep that secret a little bit longer.”

  Her only response, a sleepy moan; Kreiger took it as acquiescence. Lifting her half-empty mug, he sniffed cautiously at the contents, twilight transforming it to an inky blackness, tealeaves swirling faintly below the surface. He squinted, not liking what he saw. Things were moving more quickly than expected, new players entering the arena. He was not alone anymore; perhaps he never truly was.

  Bad fucking mojo.

  Kreiger flung the tea over the roof’s edge then placed the empty cup back on the ledge. Let her believe she finished it off, or that it spilled. He didn’t care; he had other fish to fry. “Just try not to touch him,” he warned. “No telling what will happen if the two sides touch before the planes intersect.”

  She shrugged ignorantly, revealing the fallen book, the only copy of Jack Lantirn’s The Sanity’s Edge Saloon. “I keep meaning to read this,” he said softly to no one, “but I never seem to find the time.”

  He turned towards the stairs, ghost-silent, opening the door, descending. “But there are other matters to attend to tonight. Don’t get up. This shouldn’t take long.”

  Then Gusman Kreiger faded back into the folds of darkness, leaving Ellen alone on the rooftop. She stirred only once, attuned to a final whisper that floated hollow and empty from the shadows.

  “Smells like someone needs to take out the trash.”

  THE DOCTOR IS OUT

  Streetlamps came on, lighting the world outside the office of Frederick Kohler, Doctor of Psychiatry, in a faded orange-sodium glow, nightlight of the new urban sprawl. He sat in the growing darkness until he could no longer make out the details of the photos and records scattered upon his desk. Then he turned on a single desk lamp, the shade a self-indulgent lozenge of bright green on brass. There amidst the collected history and jumbled pictures of Ellen Monroe’s past was the photograph of his high school graduation, of Cassie and him, a forgotten memory from another time. Cassie was fifteen then, the photo intended as a testimonial to his nurturing qualities, his familial nature, an artificial means of breaking down the barriers his patients erected against him.

  That was what he told himself, and he almost believed it—would have believed it—until the day Ellen Monroe was referred to him.

  Now he wasn’t sure.

  So much time spent creating realities within our own mind, a means of looking at ourselves, at others, at the world. After a while you started to believe it, the self-delusion, the fabrications, the world through a glass darkly.

  And now that world-view was starting to fracture, the rose-colored glasses cracked, the pressure behind them threatening to blow everything apart. There were questions; questions that demanded answers. Was Cassie a long-buried incestuous desire, or just the lingering feelings of a first encounter with his sexuality, a child’s clumsy efforts at understanding his world? Were these feelings obfuscated by his cousin’s untimely death, guilt making him imagine a relationship between them that did not actually exist outside the confines of his own mind? Maybe nothing was as he remembered it. He thought there was a bond between them, an inseparable tie forged from circumstance. But maybe he was alone in this. Maybe Cassie had simply forgotten it the way children forget events they perceive as inconsequential.

  And maybe she died before she was able to explore the ramifications of her childhood.

  Everyone was shocked by Cassie’s death; everyone but him. Cassie always had a gleam of self-destruction in her eyes. Heart on her sleeve, panties balled up in her pocket, she had a reputation as early as seventh grade. In his lifetime, Frederick had only been in three fistfights, all of them defending his little cousin’s honor. He lost all of them. And on each occasion, Cassie had told him he was silly to fight for her and that the boys were only teasing him, and meant nothing by it. Then she would hug him and hold a towel of wrapped ice against his black eye or his swollen lip. Cassie was not interested in having her honor defended, and Freddy was finally forced to surrender to that fact though it burned like a white-hot brand. Boys would come to see her, standing on the porch wanting nothing more than quick, uncomplicated sex. Not even a friend, Cassie was just an easy fuck. None of them cared about her. Never had. Never would. And Cassie didn’t care either.

  But Freddy cared. His cousin was a jag of steel turning in his belly, his every move afflicted with pain. How much of her life, how much of her death, was your fault, huh Freddy? Were you the one who first turned her on and turned her out? Was your idiot curiosity, your perverted, preadolescent lust, what sent her down that road, her body a ticket to instant approval and acceptance, false love?

  Or was that afternoon significant only to you?

  No answers, only questions. He worked them over in his brain until they were raw and bleeding, the afternoon turning to evening, evening to night.

  He left for college on an academic scholarship, and Cassie dropped out of school shortly thereafter. Rumor was she became pregnant, and his aunt quietly slipped her away to get an abortion. He didn’t bother finding out if that was true. He only wondered how much of it was his responsibility? How much should he have known?

  When his father
called him that afternoon in late October and told him in a dry, husky voice that Cassie was dead, his first emotion was something akin to disappointment, a page of his past behind him, lost forever. There was something more, though, something repellant: relief. With Cassie’s death, his shame died also, unconfessed and perhaps unremembered, but hopefully not unforgiven. And as they lowered Cassie into the ground, he lowered all the dark memories of her down also.

  That easily, they were gone. And for twenty years, life was good.

  Then Ellen Monroe came along, carrying with her one too many things that reminded him of a cousin he had tried hard to forget. And with her resurrection, Cassie brought back the secret shame of little Freddy Kohler, the repressed circumstances of their relationship. And Kohler knew his life would never be the same.

  There was no love without hate, no desire without cost.

  And what he thought was most disturbing was his efforts to win not only Ellen Monroe’s trust, but her interest. He understood its nature now, and it horrified him; his deviance was not gone like some relic from the past, but a buried desire that had not withered and died for lack of attention, but festered and swollen. Ellen Monroe was a substitute; no matter the similarities, she was not his cousin. As a patient, a relationship with her was unethical, but not amoral.

  And wasn’t she just a little bit interested. The perfume, the teasing glimpses of bared skin. What would she look like with her dress hiked up over her hips, panties twisted around her ankles? Would she look like Cassie if Cassie had grown up, developed a woman’s curves?

  No! Tomorrow he would contact Gabriel Monroe and recuse himself as Ellen’s therapist. He would work on getting her reassigned to another. Dr. Chopra, perhaps?

  It was all for the better.

  Dr. Frederick Kohler had no way of knowing that the decision had already been made for him.

  Free will is an illusion; some matters are in the hands of fate.