“Yeah, I know. But it’s no use. I can’t find the keys anywhere.” He gives another disappointed look at the red pickup.
“Well, if you’re sure they won’t be home, we’d better get going.” She stands up, brushes off the back of her jeans, and starts walking towards the truck.
The boy jumps up and follows, confused. “It’ll take us half the day to walk.”
“It’ll take us half an hour to drive. You can drive, can’t you?”
“Yeah, sure. Well, sorta. But not without the keys.”
“Your grandfather doesn’t keep ‘em in the house, remember? He throws ‘em under the seat so he can always find ‘em when he needs ‘em.” She turns, looking at him with a wild, mischievous smile; a smile he likes in a boyish way a man might later consider a sign of love. “I knew you wouldn’t find ‘em.”
She turns and runs to the truck, laughing excitedly as the boy chases after. Each leaps into separate doors and meets in the middle. The boy reaches under the seat, pawing until he produces the single ring on a leather fob, a lone pair of keys. It takes a couple tries with the clutch and the gas before the truck starts without stalling, then backs around in a lazy circle until its nose is headed down the dirt road that runs up over the farm and into the woods to the old quarry. He eases it into first and rolls forward.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this.” Awestruck, he clumsily shifts into second, paying excruciating detail to his driving. “I don’t even have a swimsuit or anything.”
Hands braced on the door and the dash, the truck bouncing and dipping along the dirt road, the girl holds her face to the open window, the wind blowing her hair. “So what. I don’t either. No one will be up there; we won’t need ‘em.”
The red pickup pulls away along the dirt road into a shaded wood. Scene fades to black.
* * *
Ellen jerked slightly, feeling like she had momentarily nodded off. The movie felt like her daydream—or maybe it was a daydream: the young boy from down the road, she the young girl. Celluloid images like windows into her past. But were they real? Was she watching memories or constructing them, fabricating a past, an insulated layer of lies?
The Scarlet Cinema rolled the next movie.
* * *
Dry afternoon, seasonless plains, New Mexico badlands. A young man leans on a slat-board fence in the backyard of a rundown ranch, chin resting on the fold of his arms, staring off into the distance: dry, flat ground as far as the eye can see, iron-rich earth the color of terra cotta, old flowerpots, shriveled weeks-old oranges. No trees. No plants. No distant buildings or signs of habitation. Mountains in the distance, low and dull against the burned-out sky. He sighs.
Stretched out on top of a picnic table is a young woman sunning herself; she raises her head. “What is it?”
“We gotta get out of here,” he answers.
She raises herself up on one elbow, shading her eyes. “Why?”
“‘Cause if we don’t, we’ll eventually disappear like the rest of the world out there.”
The wind tugs a lock of the young man’s hair into his face; he makes no move to push it back, thinking it a romantic image of melancholy. Instead, he turns to the tired house: blistered paint, curled shingles, the yard hard-packed dirt incapable of supporting anything but weeds. It is out of place and miserable. “I don’t know where it went to or when it disappeared, but I know it wasn’t always like this. We gotta leave while we still can.”
She does not respond, but only stares at him from under the shade of her hand.
“Will you come with me?” he asks.
She is silent for a moment. Then: “Of course. Where will we go?”
Smiling, he moves towards her, hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans; he is young; graceful articulation escapes him. “Anywhere we want. It’s all out there; it’s just waiting for us.”
The view centers and pulls back, widening to the vast horizon. Dissolve.
Open on a movie rental store late at night. Three people remain amidst the empty aisles of DVD boxes and dark Berber carpeting: a young woman behind the counter and two customers.
“Both movies are due back Thursday,” the cashier says automatically.
The first customer takes his DVDs—Annie Hall and Sex and Lucia—and heads quickly towards the door. The young woman shrugs indifferently. The last customer is a young man carrying half a dozen DVDs. He steps forward and places the stack down on the counter then reaches for his wallet. The cashier begins scanning the movies into the register. She knows him the way all cashiers know all regular customers, a kind of anonymous familiarity, an acquaintance who is known and not known both at once, paradoxical and symptomatic of the times.
“Big movie fan?” she remarks.
“Sorta,” he says, fishing out his rental card and a twenty. “I just lost my job.”
The cashier looks up. “For real?”
He nods, his smile a little more forced than a moment before; the news is still new to him, the reaction it engenders still unaccustomed.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Both are surprised to discover that she is sincere.
“I’m not,” he replies. “I don’t think that job was really any good for me anyway. I just kind of fell into it, ya know. After a while, I convinced myself it was okay, that it was where I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. But it wasn’t.”
The cashier finishes ringing up his movies, the transaction taking place beneath the conversation like the world outside the window, separated by a pane of glass, inconsequential. “Yeah. And what do you want to do?”
“I want to be a writer,” he answers.
She nods. “Newspapers or novels?”
The customer pauses, not so much to consider his answer as the interest she takes in asking the question. “Novels.”
“Novels are good,” she says. “Why didn’t you do that before? Before the other job, I mean.”
“I wasn’t sure I was good enough. And I guess I never thought it was very realistic.”
“And now?” she asks.
“I think what’s realistic is a lot broader than I originally gave it credit for.”
She nods. “Well, those are all due back Thursday. I guess you know the drill.”
“Yeah. Hey, would you like to get a cup of coffee or something?”
She glances at the clock on the wall, frowning. “I’m stuck here until midnight.”
“What about after? Is midnight too late for a cup of coffee?”
She smiles—it is a smile he has always liked, the one he instantly fell in love with, the one that keeps him coming back to this same store, time after time.
“I don’t think it’s ever too late for coffee.”
“My name’s Jack. I guess you already knew that … from my account.”
The cashier nods, laughing gently as he reaches over to shake her hand.
“Hi Jack,” she says. “I’m Ellen.”
He gathers his movies and heads for the door. “How about I stop back at midnight. We’ll go somewhere and get coffee.” He pauses at the door. “You know, for three weeks I’ve wanted to ask you out, but I never did.”
“No?” she says. “Why not?”
“A customer hitting on a cashier; I guess I didn’t think it was realistic. Now I’m kinda glad I lost my job.”
He leaves and the cashier watches him go, smiling.
Fade to black.
It is late morning outside of a truck stop along the highway in the desert southwest. A semi pulls away in a cloud of dust. The glare from the sun burns out the colors of the world inside the diner. The breakfast rush is over; the diner’s patrons have moved on. Points west. Points east. All points but here. The only waitress on duty leans her elbows on the counter and stares out the front windows at the empty desert outside, the packed dirt of the lot, the gray slice of asphalt, the distant mountains. She wonders if there is something more.
A bell over the door rings. The young waitress looks
up and sighs—she asked the owner to get rid of the bell, but he refused, saying it was expected for a truck stop to have a bell; a bell over the door and cute waitresses in short skirts. God forbid anything in this world should be unexpected, unusual, anything but completely and utterly typical. Every Wednesday after closing, the owner locks the door to the office under the pretext of doing the books, and spends the evening masturbating to magazines of fat women. He is always in a good mood on Wednesdays. Typical.
A long-haired young man stands in the doorway—just passing through; locals don’t wear their hair long after they turn eighteen unless they’re from the res. He’s dressed in denim, dusty from the road, but his smile is pleasant. He has nice eyes.
“Morning. What can I get ya?” the waitress asks.
The man sits down at the counter. “Coffee?”
“Decaf or regular?”
“Not much point in decaf,” he says lightly. “Regular, please.”
Smiling, the waitress turns to get the coffeepot. The man’s eyes travel her up and down quickly—but not too quickly. When she turns back around, he makes it a point to be looking at the menu board posted on the wall behind the counter. She isn’t fooled.
“Where ya headed?” she asks. When you’re paid on tips, a certain amount of small talk helps pay the bills.
“West.”
“What’s west?” she asks.
“Something other than what I left behind.”
The waitress nods. “I was headed west about four months ago. I got about this far. I was broke, my feet were sore, and when I thumbed for rides, both the truckers and the cops assumed I was a hooker. I’ve been waiting tables here ever since.”
“What were you looking for out west?”
“Same as you, I guess; anything but what I left behind.”
The man smiles. “There hasn’t been gold in California for a century, but somehow everyone goes there looking for their dreams.”
“The land of second chances,” she says, intending it as an offhand remark.
The man looks up from his coffee. “Exactly. It’s like if you can put an entire continent between yourself and what was before, that previous life can’t ever drag you back. You can start over. Do things the way you should have the first time.”
The scene pulls back, the two people left of frame, their conversation going unheard as Sheryl Crowe’s “Everyday Is a Winding Road” plays over the scene. In the rest of the frame, time passes rapidly while they talk, the hands on the clock spinning, shadows drawing across the diner’s floor to hide along walls. No customers enter.
“You know, if you’re still looking to head west, you’re welcome to join me,” he says. “I can’t promise where we’ll end up, but I can certainly offer you a lift if you’re interested.”
The waitress looks around at the empty diner: the bell over the door, the tables she has cleaned so many times that counting has become meaningless. She looks back over her shoulder, seemingly peering through the walls at the dingy kitchen, grill thick with grease, the owner’s back office with his fat-fetish magazines, hidden but not as well as he thinks. She turns back to him.
“When can we leave?”
The man drops three dollars on the counter; too much for a cup of coffee, but a bargain for a fellow dreamer. The waitress throws her apron in the garbage, turns the sign on the door to read closed, and erases the daily specials board, replacing the soup of the day with GOODBYE. They exit together.
In the lot, a weather-beaten red pickup, its backend replaced with the living legs and tail of a red dragon, scales the same faded red as the rest of the truck. This does not seem unusual to either of them. The view pulls back and up as they climb in and drive away. The truck disappears down the road.
Fade to black.
* * *
Scenes ran one into the next, some original, others rehashed moments from classic movies, the roles recast; Ellen didn’t need to hear the names to recognize the players. Jack in a white suit leaning against a bar in Morocco, herself in an evening gown, hair stiff, face made-up. Of all the gin joints in all the worlds … We’ll always have pancakes. Seated across a desk from each other, shadows from the window blinds crossing her face, Jack’s fedora tipped down a little too far.
Some she could not immediately place, the characters too long ago, too young to recognize; an imagined past of their imagined youth, projected images of a projected life that neither one lived. The segments ran on and on, no titles or ends, just moments like random thoughts, the flow of one long, strange trip: innocence and romance, ulcerated tales of passion and longing, carefree and uninhibited.
Ellen drifted in and out, time meaningless as movie clips ran end to end into sojourns upon the dreamscape. Which was which, she could no longer tell.
“What does all this mean?” she whispered.
Jack leaned an ear to her, his eyes on the screen. “What do you mean?”
“Is this supposed to be us? Is this how you imagine us?”
He turned to her in the dark. “This was the only movie I could find. I’ve never even been in here before today.”
“But you created all this somehow.”
“The Nexus picks up on thoughts and emotions, both idle and directed,” he said, shaking his head. “I think what we’re seeing is more like daydreams, mine … maybe yours.”
“But I can’t control the Nexus, Jack.”
“No, but you can influence it. From the moment you first appeared on the back porch of the saloon, this place has never been the same. You may not control it the way I do, but you affect it.”
“So this—” she gestured at the celluloid reality “—is mine?”
“Try not to draw too many conclusions. It’s just random thoughts and notions; creativity from chaos. When everything becomes a means to an end, the world is bled of its wonder. What remains is a husk, just translucent bones, death.”
“But is this real?” she asked.
Jack smiled. “It’s just a movie.”
THE LONG AWAITED REUNION
Time in dreams is mercurial and elusive, inconsistent, at once elongated ribbons of forever, at once fleeting as raindrops. That morning, Gusman Kreiger came to the Edge of Madness Café, falling out of the sky from over a thousand feet up to crash upon the pavement with all the grace of a kite on a windless day.
For those who care, it was a Tuesday.
Anywhere but the Edge of Madness, anywhere more than a stone’s throw from the Nexus, the crossroads of all creation, and the Cast Out who once called himself Jesus Christ in a timeline very different from anything Jack and Ellen might remember, would have died instantly, pulverized upon impact.
But this was not any of those worlds; not any of those times; not any of those realities. Gusman Kreiger suffered no more damage than a scrap of windblown paper suffers for being flung to the sidewalk by an errant wind.
That’s not to say it didn’t hurt.
Splayed out before the immense, empty silence surrounding him, he lay in the street for what felt like an eternity, seeing nothing but the black-tarred road, feeling only the course stone against his face and hands, its solidity pressing painfully against aching bones. The smell of creosote was almost enough to mask the coppery taste of blood.
Almost.
The taste of blood means you’re hurt. And if you have flesh to be hurt then you have made it. You are not in the alleyway behind Ellen Monroe’s apartment else you would be dead, and you are not dead; ghosts do not bleed and there is no pain beyond the veil no matter what the Christian oligarchs preach. You followed her—sweet little Ellen Monroe—straight on through to the other side, which can only mean …
“I’m back.”
The words rang empty in the air as he raised his head, taking in the world he knew like his own hand. Not the reality he knew, but very, very close, the differences subtle and easy to see through. A long stretch of asphalt in a place with no roads, and beyond, an infinite bone-white desert for as far as the ey
e could see—his home no more. A garage, the Last Stop, Anubis waiting with scales raised in judgment, prepared to weigh the value of the dead. A diner, the Edge of Madness Café, dark but for a single neon sign: HOT COFFEE ALWAYS. No one was inside. Pounded into the roadside, a rusted steel mailbox on a weathered post: Mercy Street. Further down, road signs directed the lost.
For who but the lost would ever find themselves here?
But those here were seldom truly lost, seldom truly looking for anyplace else. The Edge of Madness Café—more specifically the Nexus from which it created itself—was its own destination, an end unto itself. He had never been more lost than when he wished to be away from this place, never more found than when he discovered a way back. This was where he was meant to be, wanted to be; the only place he truly belonged.
“I am home,” Kreiger whispered.
The Wasteland did not answer, did not care.
He looked down and saw blood on his elbows and palms. He could feel the raw scrapes bleeding on his chin, the warm ooze of blood below his nose. One hand still held the staff, once again the lightning rod steeple that adorned the uppermost rooftop of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon before he’d stolen it, before Jack blew the place to smithereens.
So much of everything was before.
An android emerged from the garage, squat and powerful, features rendered by morning twilight into flat metal and dark glass. It stepped into the road to face him, one hand extended, palm up, metal fingers curled into lethal claws, a gesture of challenge. It carried a pry bar in its other hand, the scored tip hovering over the pavement, the steel thick enough to crush something a dozen times stronger than a mere human skull.
“And this is where it ends,” Kreiger murmured.
He recognized the Guardian instantly; a master of lies and illusions, appearances did not fool the Cast Out. His fingers tightened upon the lightning rod, little more than reflex. He felt the absence of power in the metal, the staff useless, fit only to serve as a TV aerial, or a tomato stake in some alleyway vegetable garden. No match for a Guardian whose purpose for existence was the protection of the Caretaker, a duty it would execute with mechanical indifference and bestial cruelty.
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 42