"The Edge of Madness Café" - Chapters 1 & 2

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Chapter 1: DREAMS AND REGRETS

     Ellen woke with a start, throat holding back a scream, sleep no escape from the torments of a reality gone slowly insane. The madness crept in, filled her head with memories of times that never were, people she never knew, a world that did not exist. Sadness and despair.

     She’d left him behind.

     Sins lost in the jumble of her past, displaced in the blackness she loosely termed her memory, and revived in the darkness as nightmares.

     Outside Ellen’s bedroom window, the storm made the light from a street lamp waver, sliced apart by the blinds and scattered across the room. Covers pulled up around her chin, she examined each piece of darkness in turn, nightmare-induced fear dissipating slowly into a kind of featureless embarrassment.

     There was nothing there, of course. Nothing extraordinary, no monsters or apparitions, no psychopaths or leering madmen invading her apartment, watching her sleep, restless eyes twitching with dark ruminations.

     No, the room was entirely normal. Ellen kept her monsters inside her own head, and there was no protection from them. They stalked the edges of the light, waiting. Always waiting.

     That was the way madness worked.

     Ellen switched on the light by her bed, the soft glow driving back demons and shadows alike.

     For a time, at least.

     The clock on the nightstand read 5:26 AM. Too early to get up, she thought. And maybe too late to fall back asleep. Maybe.

     Beside the clock, a dog-eared book, spine creased, cover worn and frayed at the corners from being read and re-read—how many times, she could no longer remember. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

     On the very last page, a hand-written note signed with a drawing of a jack o’ lantern.

It was a message from Jack.

     It had been nearly two months since she’d seen him.

     Actually, it would be more accurate to say it had been nearly two months since she thought she’d seen him. According to her psychiatrist, Jack Lantirn did not exist. Jack Lantirn, like so much of Ellen’s memory, was nothing more than an elaborate fabrication, the results of severe manic depression and drug abuse that left her on the brink of suicide, susceptible to the suggested reality of fiction 

     The Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

     Ellen had read the book over and over since that day, the day he left her the message, the day she saw him standing across the street from the bookstore like a man waiting for a train. Jack had been watching her. Ellen hadn’t known it then, but afterwards she was certain. Watching her. Watching over her. The book was Jack’s autobiography and fantasy, a mirror of his madness, his twisted reality bound together into a loose collection of words and paper. And somehow, Ellen was an element of his insanity, a fellow traveler on his journey to the edge of dreams. Cast in the role of friend, confidant, maybe even lover—yes, probably lover, too—Ellen followed Jack through his mad tale until, suddenly and inexplicably, she found herself here, this trite, unimaginative life.

     And that was where it all started to get strange.

     According to absolutely everyone, Jack Lantirn did not exist. He was simply a character in a book by an author of the same name. An author no one could identify. Ellen asked her boss at the bookstore what he knew about The Sanity’s Edge Saloon, and Nicholas Dabble said nothing. Strange because the proprietor of Dabble’s Books possessed an almost supernatural talent for information. He cataloged the entire store in his head. Not just titles and authors, but every word from every page. He seemed, in fact, to know everything about anything, a living warehouse of information and utterly unconcerned with the profundity of it. When she pressed him as to why he did not do something more interesting with his gift, he replied that information was both inherently useless and utterly boring, and that it was only the application of information that piqued his interest.

     So it was to Ellen’s amazement and his that Nicholas Dabble knew nothing about The Sanity’s Edge Saloon. The single paperback copy had arrived mixed in with a distributor’s shipment a couple months ago. It did not appear on the packing slip, and the shipper, when called, had no record of the book whatsoever: not just of sending them a copy of the book, but even of its existence. The publisher’s shipping agent, after fifteen flustered, fumbling minutes on the phone, finally declared that Ellen was obviously mistaken as to its origin and hung up on her.

     The book, like its author, should not exist. There was no explanation as to how it fell into her hands that day, the day Ellen had last seen—correction; thought she had last seen—Jack Lantirn, her friend and lover—or imaginary friend and lover—who may or may not exist. But the book was real, and that counted for something.

     Didn’t it?

     Ellen slipped out from under the covers and padded softly about the apartment, her bedroom too hot and stuffy to be comfortable. The windows in the other room were open, and the breeze felt good against her naked skin, reminiscent of something else, something before, something not entirely in concurrence with this reality.

     The lines between sanity and madness blurred, the boundaries between real and imaginary neither hard nor fast, lines in the sand or chalk rubbed on the sidewalk; easily smudged, easily erased.

     But since no one else seemed to notice, unless the whole world was going crazy, Ellen was losing her mind. Again.

     And she wasn’t sleeping very well lately, either.

     She stepped easily through the sparsely furnished rooms, easterly windows pale with eventual dawn. Naked in the secrecy of darkness, she thought back to that other life, or maybe that life she lived only in her head, … or in someone’s head, leastwise. The breeze against her skin reminded her of the Wasteland and the saloon. And that reminded her of Jack.

     The Caretaker.

     There was something there, but slippery. Her memory was like a stream, facts like fish she was pulling out with bare hands, only to have them wriggle loose and get lost again in the icy waters. Jack haunted her thoughts and tormented her dreams, his very presence a recrimination.

     She’d left him behind.

     As for that time before—before Jack and the Wasteland and the Saloon and everything else that, so she was told, were simply properties of her imagination—she remembered even less. All of her life before that day in the bookstore was meaningless, like words on a page written in a language she did not understand. She knew bits and pieces, but they seemed to exist without personal significance.

     Just words on a page.

     The back window of Ellen’s apartment looked down into a narrow ravine of trees. Obscured at the bottom, a thick river ran like a gray, greasy snake surrounding the town in its coils. She knelt down, folding her arms on the sill and resting her head. The dreams were incomprehensible. What she remembered made no sense, and what she forgot drove her from sleep on the verge of screaming.

     Jack had sacrificed himself. And for that, Ellen was saved.

     But for what? Court-mandated therapy sessions twice a week, random drug screenings, a mediocre job at a bookshop, no friends, no family, no one at all who cared whether she lived, died, went to the park, or went insane. No one … except Jack.

     Night after night, Jack lived on in her dreams, flickering recollections of places beyond the written page, as though they existed in her memory before reading them in his book, his tale of drawn out metaphors, misplaced fragments, and run-on sentences.

     Then there were the things Ellen knew only from what she read, having not witnessed them herself—assuming she witnessed anything at all. Ellen never saw Rebreather’s fall from the stairway. She was already on board the train, the one meant to take her and Jack out of the Wasteland and back to reality. Only Jack didn’t make it, and Rebreather didn’t die in the fall. The raging lunatic charged from the smoke of the destroyed Saloon, body broken, limbs bloody and dislocated, driven solely by madness and his hatred of the Caretaker, of Jack. He dragged Jack down, spilling them on the tracks, and the train left them behind.

     And then Ellen was here, awake from the dream, the book ended.

     In shrink speak, survivor’s guilt. She escaped. Jack didn’t.

     Ellen wiped absently at her cheek, a tear finding its way down her face, trail cold in the breeze. So frustrating, living a life that did not exist. But where was the harm then, really? She had no past, no memory of before the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. That was what she couldn’t get through to Dr. Kohler. What was the point of living solely in the now, in this reality grounded on real people and real things and real places, when she had no memory of any of them? It was a waste of time, the effort to attach meaning to the meaningless.

     The dreams were more than willing to give Ellen everything she needed, everything significant and tangible and real…

     … except permanence.

     Ellen stood up carefully, light-headed and insubstantial, like she herself was caught in a dream. Pulling a quilt from the back of a chair, she wrapped it around herself and curled up to watch the sky, scalloped shells of gray and white clouds overtaking the dark simplicity of night.

     And after a time, the wind turned cooler, damp, and Ellen fell back asleep to the sound of rain pattering against the glass, her dreams more pleasant in the hours of predawn, the world caught between the infinite possibility of night and the boundaries of the waking day.

                                                  * * *

     Outside, a figure in a battered overcoat watched the windows on the back of the apartment building where Ellen Monroe lived. He watched her move through the rooms like a ghost, watched her nakedness with a kind of trembling awe zealots afford visions of the Virgin. But he knew better. A savior maybe, but pure of neither body nor mind, simply of heart.

     But oh, what a difference that could make.

     He watched her, her confused expression and winsome look framed by distant, high windows looking out over an endless expanse of reality already made. He saw the tear upon her cheek, could smell it all the way down here in the alley, picking out its fragile scent from the rot of neglected garbage, the sticky odor of late summer grass and leaves, the acrid smell of wet asphalt.

     The rain spattered upon him, and that was a wonder also, but one whose novelty had worn thin. The changing weather rubbed at his bones, aching scars that would never fully heal.

     But despite his discomfort, he watched Ellen Monroe, watched her closely, as closely as a lover, or a father, or the penitent man seeking redemption at the foot of the Virgin.

     Soon, he thought—maybe a prognostication, maybe a prayer. Soon.

     He shuffled away with the night, a crooked staff of tarnished copper and iron tapping away at the sidewalk, knocking out a fading rhythm like the ticking of an old clock.

Chapter 2: JUST ANOTHER DAY

     It was nearly eight o’clock.

     Ellen wrapped the blanket around herself like some homeless beggar, and walked to the window where the rain had been hitting the screen for the last hour. A puddle had formed on the floor beneath the sill, but that didn’t really concern her. She simply closed the window and walked to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Mr. Dabble wasn’t expecting her at the store until 9:30. Plenty of time.

     She stood in the shower, forehead against the tile, and let the water run down through her hair and across her skin. Like standing in a waterfall, she thought idly. Then, thinking about it a little longer, she supposed it really wasn’t like that at all. It was only a shower.

     But it was a welcome sensation all the same.

     Ellen always felt better if she could get back to sleep before first light. In the twilight, she dreamed. She would see Jack, speak with him, touch him. So very different from the hollow-eyed nightmares of being alone. In the nightmares, even when Jack was there, he was oblivious, as though she was a ghost he could not see, could not hear. She watched him shiver beneath the night sky, the Wasteland sand as white as the bones of everyone who had ever died there across the span of eternity. Ellen watched him scrape the residue from the inside of an old soup can, hunger reducing him to a stray dog. She saw him scribble his stories on rare pieces of paper, front and back filled from corner to corner, top to bottom in tight, tiny script like the ravings of a lunatic.

     Paper was difficult to come by in the Wasteland.

     And therein lay the problem. This made-up world, senseless and nonexistent, was known to her. Ellen knew things about it, both things from the book and things not, but still true all the same. She had no way of knowing any of it for certain, no proof she could point to. But still, she knew.

     But which dreams to believe? In the nightmares, Jack lived a mad hermit’s existence on the edge of a cliff bordering unrestricted dreams-turned-to-lunacy, huddling in the blasted wreckage of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, and battering out his stories on a broken typewriter incapable of accessing the Nexus and making them real. Then there were the dreams where Jack remade the focal lens stolen by the white sorcerer, Gusman Kreiger. Jack rebuilt the world around him, made it in his own image, a small god starting his own book of Genesis on the outskirts of reality. In the nightmares, Ellen was kept from him, living only through the soft breeze on his skin or the cold face of the moon. Jack did not know of her, could not sense her near him, or know that she cared. In the twilight dreams, Jack could always see her, though they did not talk with the urgency or passion of lovers parted, but the simple familiarity of two people alone in a house, moving from room to room, offering brief conversation or greetings as they passed.

     Either reality was plausible, Ellen supposed. And either just as likely untrue.

     The water turned suddenly scalding, someone in the apartment complex running the cold water out of her pipes. Ellen yelped and leaped back from the steaming jets, standing awkwardly on one foot in the far corner of her tub while she waited for the water pressure to normalize.

     That’s what you get for spending too much time inside your head. Just make peace with the here and now. Accept it.

     Accept it.

     Ellen gingerly tested the water before rinsing herself off and climbing out. The sky outside was the sad gray of summer rain, of a missed morning that would clear by the afternoon. Good. She saw Dr. Kohler today, and she hated waiting in the rain afterwards for the bus. And she refused to wait in his tiny office, eyeing the fixtures or pretending to read the magazines he left on the coffee table, out of date and uninteresting. Ellen left Dr. Kohler’s office the moment her session was complete, and refused to think about going back until her next appointment. One of the many conditions of her freedom was twice-weekly sessions with Dr. Frederick Kohler. But damned if she would lose one more minute of her life in his office, thoughts scrutinized, dreams picked apart.

     She’d stand in the rain if need be.

     Ellen put on a white summer dress and a pair of slip-on sneakers; the hardwood floor at Dabble’s Books was no place for heels, and Dr. Kohler needed no additional encouragement. He would find the dress sufficiently distracting. Not that there was anything obvious about Dr. Kohler—no lingering stare at her breasts, the accidental brush of the knee, or hand gently wrapping her shoulder—but the impression remained. There was something about Dr. Kohler that simply wasn’t right.

     Paranoia is a sign of mental illness.

     Ellen’s freedom had three conditions, actually. Maintain gainful employment, stay within the city limits, and meet twice a week with the court-appointed therapist. Dr. Frederick Kohler. Dr. Kohler also reported to her father. Daddy’s means of assuring Ellen stayed safely out of the way and under control. She was free so long as she remained a prisoner. Therapy twice a week out here in the real world, or Thorazine twice a day in an asylum. Daddy loved offering choices.

     But how do I know this is the real world? Ellen wondered, a piece of toast in one hand and a half-empty glass of juice in the other. Dreams are real until you wake up, and you realize you can’t do in reality what you can in dreams. So how do I know I won’t wake up at some moment and discover that all of this is just a dream?

     Yeah, she thought dryly, taking a bite from her toast. And maybe I’m really just a rabbit dreaming she’s a human.

     Ellen placed the glass in the sink, threw her bag over her shoulder—checking first to make sure that The Sanity’s Edge Saloon was safely stowed in the bottom—and left, locking the door behind her.

     “Jasper? That you?”

     Ellen turned as the door across the hall opened, a squat, black woman shuffling out upon the landing, hair coarse as steel wool. She squinted through thick-framed glasses, pulling together the sides of a gray, faded sweater.

     “Oh, Ellen, I’m sorry. I thought you were Jasper.”

     Rose Marie Desmond lived with her grandson in the apartment across from hers. They shared a landing, and sometimes exchanged mail when the postman became confused or simply indifferent. A pleasant enough neighbor somewhere in her sixties, though Ellen thought she looked closer to seventy.

     “No, I’m sorry. I haven’t seen him.” They spoke to one another on the landing, the urban picket fence, a neighborly relationship where none would exist otherwise. They did not exchange recipes or news or the occasional cup of sugar or any of the things that neighbors supposedly did in that black-and-white fabrication of society’s collective, a vicarious past gleaned from fifty-odd years of semi-literate television. They had no common ground save the landing. “I was just on my way to work.”

     “Tha’s alright. I worry ‘bout him, is all. He slipped out after breakfast while I was takin’ care of bidness, ya know.”

     Ellen didn’t need to ask what “bidness” Rose Marie was talking about. The older woman could and had comfortably discussed her numerous bodily functions and dysfunctions with a perfect stranger in the supermarket, and just as quickly clucked indignantly at the shamelessly open discussions carried out by the younger generation regarding sex. Ellen chalked it up to a generational thing.

      “And when I was finished, he was gone. Just phhhht! Gone.” She shook her head. “He’s a handful, that boy is.”

     “Rose, is there …” Ellen felt her words stumble, the most obvious question regarding Rose Marie’s situation also the most tactless. “I mean … well, has a doctor ever said if there was anything they could do for him?”

     Jasper was special. That was what Rose Marie Desmond always said. Like her “bidness,” special was a euphemism. Ellen was given to understand that Jasper was the equivalent of a six-year-old; a six-year-old wearing the gangly body of a young man of seventeen. But Jasper was more complicated than that. There were times when he was fairly lucid and other times when he simply blabbered non-stop to anyone or no one for hours. And there were still other times when he said nothing at all, sometimes for days. Some form of autism or Asperger’s Syndrome maybe, though Ellen was hardly an expert. Her specialty was escaping reality … by any means available.

     Rose Marie tilted her head, the look of someone who has answered an awkward question so many times that it can no longer offend, only amuse by the embarrassment of the one who asks. “Oh, I ‘spect one has. In fact, I’m quite sure there’s a treatment of some nature out there for him. I think I saw it once on one of ‘em nighttime news shows; you know the ones I mean?”

     Ellen nodded respectfully.

     “But doctors cost money, and it’s just me now. I got my Social Security and some money Norris and I saved up before he passed on, bless him, but tha’s it. The boy’s mother gone and run off. Livin’ like a whore, she is. A whore!”

     Ellen chewed at the inside of her lip regretfully.

     “She got herself knocked up with some no-good drug dealer she was hanging around with, and when that boy came out, all screwed up from her drinkin’ and whorin’, she just left him with me. I think to myself, well, why not? I look after him for a while, then, when she’s dried out and better, we can look after the boy together. Only that ain’t what happened. She jus’ up an’ left. Living in Fort Lauderdale, or some such place. Don’t call. Don’t write. Don’t give a shit.”

     Rose Marie looked up apologetically. “Oh, Ellen, I’m sorry. Please excuse my language. I start ramblin’ on about Maggie, an’ I get myself all worked up. But it ain’t no concern of yours, and I’m sorry I made it so.”

     “It’s okay, Rose, really,” Ellen said, too late to gracefully exit the conversation, anyway.

     “I just can’t imagine leaving someone like Jasper behind? He’s such a good boy.” Then she shook her head, waved it off. “I know, I know. He’s a handful. Quiet as a church mouse for days, then, for no reason at all, he starts to babblin’ and he won’t never shut up. But he’s a good boy. He’s polite and he’s clean. He minds me, mostly.” To that last part, she sounded a little rueful. “I wish I could afford the therapy or the doctors what would make him better. I know there’s smarts locked in there somewhere. I can see it in the things he does. He’s very clever with his hands, did you know that?”

     Ellen shook her head automatically.

     “I buy him models and he assembles them just perfectly. Doesn’t even use the instructions half the time. He just looks at it, and his fingers understand how to put it together. And they’re fine, too. Smooth and tight and seamless. Like art. He’s clever with his hands. Re-worked the pieces o’ one kit into some kind of airplane once. Just amazing, though I’m not sure why. Nothin’ wrong with the ‘65 Mustang it was s’posed to be. But that plane sure looked fine.” Rose Marie beamed. “He’s got no head for inventin’, but his hands can do just fantastic things when you set them to it. Like that Rainman fella. You know the one I mean?”

     Ellen nodded. It was not the first time she’d heard Mrs. Desmond’s lament. But she also knew there was nothing she could do, nothing she could even suggest. And the fact was, his condition scared her. Not him, per se, but the simple fact that you never knew. Jasper was a reminder of the madness lurking just behind the shadows of Ellen’s own thoughts, inescapable and clever, stalking her, ready to take her unaware and rip all normalcy asunder. Seeing Jasper tightened her nerves like piano wire. Not for fear of him, but of being like him, of losing control, losing her mind, going crazy … 

     … again.

     Ellen shook her head, realizing the older woman was talking and she hadn’t been listening; too deep in her own thoughts and insecurities. Reason number one not to dispense advice, Ellen thought reproachfully: Anyone as fucked up as you is wholly unqualified.

     “Rose, I’m sorry, but I need to get to work. I’m sure Jasper will show up. I don’t think he would run off or—”

     Ellen was interrupted mid-sentence by a paper airplane circling down from the stairwell above. A broad-winged construction, tips craftily angled, it glided between the spiral switchbacks of the stairwell and down; not skipping upon the banister or whisking against the walls, but flying as if by some invisible pilot determined to navigate the four stories without a hitch or a wobble.

     “Jasper!” Rose Marie shouted up the stairs. “Are you on the roof again?”

     Ellen risked a glance up, light spilling upon the next landing where the stairs opened to the roof. More than that, she could not see.

     “It’s raining out there, you silly goose,” Rose Marie persisted. “You’ll get all wet and catch a cold. Now you come down here right now. Least put on a coat.”

     Ellen used the opportunity to leave. At the bottom of the well, she saw the paper airplane lying upon the small shag mat just inside of the door. Had the door been open, the plane might have sailed right out into the street.

     And from there, who knew how far it would go?

     Ellen nudged the plane aside with her toe and stepped out. It was only a block and a half to Dabble’s Books. She started off, walking briskly through the drizzle.

                                                  * * *

     The man in the gray coat stared after Ellen Monroe as she left.

     He knew where she was going, knew her routine intimately. She was a couple minutes late, he knew, just as he knew she wouldn’t wear a jacket or carry an umbrella, though the rain was only just tapering off and would certainly return.

     He could feel the coming storm in his knotted hands.

     Silly goose. Pride will be your undoing, though you probably don’t know it. You hardly know yourself at all.

     He, on the other hand, did not wear a raincoat because he did not own one. And he did not carry an umbrella because he did not own one of those either. He had only a staff, and it would not keep the rain from his head.

     At least, not here. Not now.

     But once…

     Well, no use crying over things lost … or maybe things that never were. For therein was the rub. What was real? And how long had it been real? And, more to the point, what was the reality before, and when was the next one coming along, that next reality that would be better than this … or at least different? And how could anything different from this not be better? The only question, when would the magic bus arrive? When could he climb aboard the cosmic carpet ride, give his token to the transit authority djinni, and punch out of this dead universe for good?

     He pondered these questions as he watched Ellen walk off to her nice normal job with her nice normal boss in the middle of her nice normal life.

     Only not so normal, and not so nice.

     He was about to follow, just as he had done every day since this began—would do every day from now until the end of eternity—when he saw something and stopped.

     There on the steps was a folded paper airplane. It sat on the stoop like a loyal and lovesick dog awaiting Ellen’s return. He picked it up, unfolded it. A historical society flyer celebrating a new exhibit: Flights of Fancy: The History of Aviation. An intricate diagram of Da Vinci’s ornithopter etched in gray behind the words, words like the picture that captured his attention, seized his heart, rolled over and over in his mind. He glanced up, searching for secrets, saw only the light rain from the dappled sky, the paper flyer turning damp in his hand.

     “I knew you would come for her,” he whispered, paper clutched to his chest, sheltered from the rain.

     The empty staff clacked softly against the sidewalk and his legs and hands pained him greatly, but he listened to neither, head filled only with the penitent praises of a man found wondering lost in the desert, and is at last called home. He did not follow Ellen that morning as he had every other morning for the last two months. He did not need to.

     He had at last received a sign.