Chapter 1 of "The Sanity's Edge Saloon"

---

Chapter 1: A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER

     The first day of summer began like any other day, Jack Lantirn’s routine calcified over time until it gained the permanence of words etched in stone.

     Waking up at 6:00 AM, he got ready for work, donning a suit of drab gray, black shoes, an inexpressive tie. All per usual. He rinsed his breakfast dishes and left them in the sink. He would wash them tonight and leave them in the rack to dry, so that he could do it all over again tomorrow. Just like usual. Just like every morning. Five days a week every week.

     By 7:10, he was headed for Stone Surety Mortgage, and by 7:33, he was parked in the company’s south lot.

     There was a certain security in routine, in its precision, the semblance of normalcy it presented. Routine becomes ritual, every day like clockwork, order overseeing the tedium of the mundane. Twenty-five years old, and already he was killing time.

     But a life like clockwork freed his mind to roam the halls of his imagination, a trade-off Jack Lantirn found acceptable.

     There is an inherent fragility to clockwork, the inflexibility of the gears, the unbending quality of the springs. A machine once broken is ruined forever; discarded; replaced. Normalcy reveals itself as little more than an elaborate fabrication, a lie told over and over until it loses all cohesion, breaking apart when we believe in it most.

     In twenty-eight hours, a bomb placed in the basement of the Stone Surety Mortgage building would explode, scattering debris as far away as a quarter mile.

     Jack stared emptily at a gray layer of cloud pushing against the blue sky, the wind electrified, heated with the coming storm.

     He should have called in sick. No one needed a report analyst for a broken company, no matter what they said.

     Three weeks ago, Stone Surety’s parent company, cash-strapped and lacking a cohesive direction, auctioned off the bulk of the mortgage company’s assets to a lending house based in South Carolina. The two hundred and thirty-five employees residing within fell on the wrong side of the balance sheet, and were summarily terminated. Those still expected to show up every day either worked very little or worked very hard; neither had a future with Stone Surety Mortgage.

     Part of the former, he spent the last three weeks doing almost nothing. Who needed progress reports or product forecasts on a dead company when your job was going away? Most of his co-workers were given sixty days off with pay; not for courtesy or kindness, but because it was required by law. Two months with a paycheck. Start your job search. Take a vacation. Paint your house. Just go away.

     Not so fortunate, Jack was at work on this particular Tuesday, the first official day of summer, absently tending a dying job.

     He entered through the loading bay, the door—normally accessible only with an employee ID card—blocked open to accommodate the movers loading a semi in the bay with banker’s boxes of mortgage files, what was loosely termed “assets” in this industry. He passed rows of empty cubicles once loud with telemarketing reps. No one even bothered to turn on the lights in this part of the building.

     Strangely, the company trusted him to come in for eight hours a day on the off-chance someone—who, no one seemed to know—had a report-based question about numbers that no longer mattered.

     Jack discovered that being trustworthy was not actually a compliment in corporate America. Some thought so, but they were wrong. Being trustworthy meant you were afraid. It meant you wouldn’t step out of line or do anything unusual. It meant he could be trusted to do exactly what was expected of him. And on that day when the company expected him to walk away without raising a fuss, he would do that too.

     A dry-erase board greeted him at the end of the empty cubicles, naked and white but for a single, inelegant phrase printed in violent green: TODAY IS TUESDAY. Once filled with achievements and assignments for the coming week, month, year, now there was only emptiness.

     It could as easily have said that the day would be no different than any other day, the same as yesterday and the day before and the day before that. It might have promised that today would be repeated over and over and over until Jack went completely insane. It might have said all that and been true.

     But this way was simpler. Today is Tuesday.

     Another day closer to unemployment. Surfing want-ads, trying to set up first interviews, asking anyone he knew if they had heard of any openings, and could they let him know about job-postings they might come across. Eventually money would run out, and he would get some desperate job that paid him less, made him work more, and put off his dreams of being a writer a little longer.

     Just thinking about it made him feel sick.

     So Jack tried very hard not to.

     Denial.

     It was a day like any other.

     A cardboard box packed with one hundred sticks of dynamite would explode near the gas main in the basement of the Stone Surety Mortgage building tomorrow morning. The detonation would obliterate most of the building in what authorities would call the most devastating singular bomb blast on American soil since Oklahoma City. The only silver lining, the building was empty, no employees remaining.

     But that was still twenty-eight hours away.

     Jack made his way to the cafeteria where he spent the next forty minutes writing and drinking mediocre coffee served from a vending machine, killing time before the start of his shift. In its heyday, the company employed over seven hundred people, the cafeteria serving both breakfast and lunch. It closed a year ago during the first round of layoffs—you should have seen this coming, then, you know—leaving only the vending machines behind.

     I just want to be a writer.

     His book seemed so much more important now: for himself, for his sanity, for no other reason than he hoped to be a real writer one day. But right now, writing didn’t pay. Truthfully, it cost more in time and money than it was worth. Just a foolish hobby. He’d heard stories of first-time writers getting fat advances from publishers, of semi-literate pop icons releasing bestsellers into the market. Exceptions that proved the rule, he insisted. If he wanted to continue eating and paying rent, he needed a job.

     Dreams could wait.

     Through the wall of windows lining one side of the cafeteria, Jack stared out at the lawn, grass bright green, still shining with dew. What’s stopping you from leaving? From simply getting up from this chair, walking out the door, and never coming back? Not to your job or your apartment or anything. A dozen steps? Twenty at the most. Open the door and just walk away. It would be a whole different world then, wouldn’t it? So what’s stopping you from simply leaving?

     The question occurred more often of late, and more often he had trouble coming up with an answer.

     Most of the immediate terminations took place last Wednesday. By Thursday morning, Jack had ten pre-programmed numbers on his desk phone that rang dead lines.

     And on Friday, Jools left.

     Technically, she left Saturday morning, but it was over on Friday.

     Every Friday after work, they met at Finnegan’s Pub, part of his comfortable clockwork. Jack arrived early—nothing at the office to occupy his time or keep him late—and saw Jools sitting with a man, sitting too close, laughing too comfortably. He leaned towards her—this man she was with—and they kissed. Jack watched it all from across the room, not knowing what to think, how to feel, what to believe. Only emptiness, a void of thought and emotion. He was actually prepared to dismiss it as nothing, his misunderstanding—He’s probably just a friend, a relative perhaps. And Jools is affectionate, demonstrative; a kiss means nothing. After all, she’s your girlfriend. Six months now. Hardly a lifetime, but it means something. He should—

     Jools leaned into the stranger’s kiss, eyes closed, the space between them disappearing.

     … should …

     Six months evaporated like ice on a hot sidewalk—a meaningless waste, empty time—as two lovers kissed, her hand brushing his cheek, his fingers caressing her hip, gestures of dreadful familiarity.

     … should …

     Jools looked up, saw him standing there, watching, doing nothing. No surprise or guilt in her expression, only resignation. And perhaps pity.

     Jack nearly collided with the doorframe as he tried to escape, pulse deafening, hands trembling. He walked uneasily to his car, driving home in silence, hands tightening upon the wheel until his knuckles ached. Back at his apartment, he collapsed into a chair, strength pouring from him like water. This must be what it feels like to bleed to death, he thought, the notion both romantic and ignorant as he sat in the swelling darkness, nursing his misery.

     He needed Jools to be there for him. Especially now. Selfish perhaps, but what was the point of love if you couldn’t depend on it when you needed it?

     This notion was similarly romantic, and just as ignorant.

     Jack never particularly cared about his job, not really. But he cared about Jools. An unfocused dreamer doomed to be utterly ordinary, utterly forgettable, a hapless victim of his own mediocrity, Julie Eden—she’d nicknamed herself Jools because she thought it sounded exotic—was everything Jack could ever imagine wanting. Extraordinary. Beautiful. Bright. Exciting. Jools had a few tattoos, a piercing not in her ears. What she saw in him, he never understood, and never allowed himself to think too hard on.

     It would have surprised him to learn that Julie Eden was not so different from him, a romantic who believed in the adage that still waters run deep. A self-professed writer, Jack seemed exciting at first. Unrealized potential. Raw clay to be molded and shaped, his inner qualities coaxed to the surface. But when she reached into the pool that was Jack Lantirn, she made a disappointing discovery: it wasn’t really all that deep. She’d tired of the labor, and moved on to more willing clay, more realized potential.

     All dreams end eventually, and we wake up.

     If he was being honest with himself—which was rare—Jack did not love Jools so much as the idea of Jools; that glimpse into another life, a more pristine life that writers and artists deserved, of satiated wants and fulfilled needs. But that same honesty would force another revelation he was even less prepared for: he was not a writer or an artist. He was no one. Nobody. Nothing. When you cut through the bullshit, Jack was a writer who had never been published, not once, not even in a school paper or some local literary magazine with a circulation of less than a hundred.

     Jools’ disillusionment was understandable, her betrayal not unexpected—if Jack was being totally honest with himself.

     But that was rare.

     Jools walked in, found him sitting in the darkness. He’d given her a key two months ago, that eager to believe it would work. “Can we talk?”

     He didn’t answer.

     “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to find out like that.”

     “How did you want me to find out?”

     Light from outside turned her to shadows and lines. “I wasn’t really sure how to tell you. This isn’t easy for me.”

     Amazing! He wasn’t aware he was supposed to make it so. 

     “I … I guess I thought it would be different. When you told me you were a writer, it sounded exciting, you know. I guess it was silly of me to think that.”

     “I’m sorry to disappoint you.” He hoped the remark would sound venomous and scathing, but realized it came out very much like a sincere apology.

     “It wasn’t you, really. I just expected something … more. For a while I thought I could deal with it, but I can’t. I’m sorry you found out about it that way, though. It wasn’t fair.”

     “I’m getting used to it.”

     “Please don’t hate me.”

     And the break in her voice just then was the cruelest thing he could imagine. Cruel because it dangled hope before him, and Jack swam eagerly to the bait. There was just enough light to see the tears against her cheek and make him regret the hurtful things he had said—or meant to say. He wanted to comfort her, hold her in his arms and press her head to his shoulder, feel her warmth against his skin, even …

     “I don’t want to end this with you hating me,” she said, stepping closer, kneeling down in the chair over top of him. “Please say you won’t hate me, Jack. Please.”

     He shook his head, said nothing. In that moment, he concocted elaborate myths of how Jools would fall back in love with him, how she would see his commitment to her and forget this other guy, make love to him tonight, and stay with him forever. And everything would be as it was.

     She leaned down to kiss him, a deep, aching kiss like none he had ever had before. And for a brief time, Jack Lantirn believed his own fiction.

     The next morning, he awoke alone in the gray light of predawn, tangled in sweat-soaked sheets that smelled of spent lust and Jools’ perfume. A note left on the pillow, very trite, very cliché.

                    Jack, I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me.

                                   I will always love you.

                                                    — Jools

     He had forgiven her. He had promised he would not hate her. He’d cleaned her Karma in exchange for one last night, one final bit of fiction.

     And so Jools left, free to pursue her life without him.

     Jack wrapped himself in his writing, such as it was, and retreated into his routine, hoping that through an imitation of normalcy he might in some way influence its return. He was the superstitious primitive stamping around the fire, petitioning the night sky and casting chicken’s blood into the blaze. Only this ritualistic dance was called the daily grind, his work, his routine. But there was no work. Bored at his desk, he loaded his writing into the computer and worked on it every day, trucking it back and forth on a thumb drive. His routine would save him from going mad, from losing his mind, from standing up and walking the hell out of everything. What is keeping me here? The routine. The routine would bring back normalcy; it would bring back the reality he had learned to cope with.

     These were the lies Jack Lantirn made himself believe.

     He wrote out a page and a half in long-hand before heading up from the cafeteria to the pre-fabricated, mauve walls of his cubical where he started his day by turning on his computer.

     No, not his computer. Not really. No more than it was his cubical, his files, or his reports. None of this was his. It was all temporary, borrowed, privileges on the verge of being rescinded, sixty days and done. Surrender your ID badge upon exiting the premises.

     Jack loaded the story from his thumb drive—this, at least, was his—and started typing what he had written in the cafeteria.

     A winter storm rolled across the leaden sky, eddies of wind twisting cascades of great crystal helices, snow strands of DNA collapsing under the onslaught of some new viral strain.

     So this is the way the world goes, Andrew thought, echoing T.S. Eliot, his existence consumed by his own needs, his desperate wants. Who cared about storms and snow and everything else? Who cared at all about anything?

     Please. Please don’t leave me.

     At the sound of footsteps, Jack’s fingers toggled a report kept in the background just as his supervisor poked his head around the corner. No one at Stone Surety Mortgage cared about wasting company time anymore, and Jack knew that! Dammit!

     Fear, like any habit, dies a hard, slow death.

     “Jeez, Jack,” Henry said. “I didn’t expect to find you here. You must leave your place pretty early.”

     Jack shrugged. “Usually.”

     “I called you around seven-thirty, but I guess you’d left already.”

     He nodded. Already they’d traded more words than they did on most days, and some weeks. “Why? What’s up?”

     “Well, something happened last night.” Henry’s expression became awkward, pensive. “Someone broke in. Stole some equipment.”

     Jack stared as if Henry might be speaking in tongues.

     “It happened after everyone left,” Henry pressed on. “Video surveillance shows someone just walked in off the street through the loading dock. They couldn’t make out his face, but … anyway, the company’s feeling a little vulnerable. They want to tighten security. All personnel not actively involved with the physical transfer and shutdown of operations are being asked to leave the building. You and about thirty others who were staying on for the next few weeks are on a list of those they’d like to have turn in their ID’s and vacate the premises, so to speak. They’ve even locked all the doors except for the main entrance. I tried to call you at home, tell you not to bother dressing up for work since you’d only be coming in to collect your things.”

     Jack stared back at Henry, eyes losing focus.

     “This won’t affect your payout, of course,” Henry added quickly. “You’re still considered a full-time employee for the remainder of your sixty days. Full pay and benefits. You can just use this time to start your job search a little earlier.”

     Jack smiled appreciatively, appropriately, betraying nothing.

     “The company just needed a blanket policy that would cover everyone objectively. I didn’t even find out myself until I got in this morning. I tried to call you, but … anyway, there’s no reason to stick around for the rest of the day. Hell, I’m taking a halfer myself.” Henry smiled in an effort to make Jack feel better.

     It failed.

     “Well,” he said, the silence turning awkward, “there are some spare boxes by the filing cabinets for packing up any personal effects.”

     Jack thought he should say something; let Henry know it was okay, and that he understood. Henry was just the messenger. It wasn’t his fault.

     It wasn’t anyone’s fault.

     Before today, he was labeled harmless. Today, he was worthless. Four years of college, two years on the job, countless hours of unpaid overtime to make sure that what needed doing got done and done right, and they were just going to send him home like a goddamn temp good for nothing but fetching coffee and tacking notes to the memo board: TODAY IS TUESDAY.

     And the worst part of it all was that Jack would do it. He would pack up his desk, turn off his—the! —computer, and leave. He wouldn’t complain, or steal the tape dispenser, or the stapler, or even a box of paper clips. He would simply leave.

     “Jack, are you okay? You have a way home, don’t you?”

     “Yeah, sure,” Jack murmured distantly. “Let me just shut my system down, and I’ll get out of here. It shouldn’t take long.”

     “No need to hurry,” Henry said good-naturedly.

     But Jack was no longer paying attention. There was a need, but Henry couldn’t see it. If Jack didn’t leave quickly, he might find himself doing something … unpredictable; breaking his routine; breaking.

     He turned back to the computer, making a show of closing files. He ignored his boss, hoping he would simply go away. He didn’t want a sounding board or a shoulder to cry on. He wanted normalcy. And he wasn’t going to get it here.

     Jack loaded the little he’d managed to gather in two years into a copier paper box: a cheap clock radio, a picture of Jools, his Heavy Metal movie commemorative mug, and a stack of pens—stolen, but who gives a shit, he thought fiercely. A writer needs to write, and he needs pens to write with.

     “Just sign out at the front desk,” Henry said from the doorway of his own cubicle—larger, but a prefab cube all the same; easily torn down when the use for it ceased. Stone Surety was not reality; it was Studio Lot B the day after shooting finished on a movie set. Soon, everything would be broken down and reassembled for the next project—the role of Henry Leeds, Supervisor, will be played by … 

     “You have my number,” Henry said. “Call if you need anything, okay? Good luck.”

     Jack nodded and wished him the same. It was a great performance.

     It wasn’t until Jack unclipped his ID card and left it with the receptionist that it hit him: his job was over; finished, The End in bold letters. What he felt was something between numbness and the feeling of being punched in the stomach, left winded and sucking air. His signature as he signed out was an illegible scribble, hands still shaking as he started across the empty parking lot.

     He stopped halfway, staring in disbelief, his meager box of possessions limp in one hand.

     Beneath the front of his car, a widening puddle of florescent green.

     Jack knew nothing about cars, but even he knew leaked radiator fluid when he saw it.

     Inside Jack’s mind, the last frayed fiber of a long rope snapped with an audible twang, and the line sailed away into the darkness, taking Jack Lantirn with it.

     It was not quite nine o’clock.

     Jack left the box on the hood of his car, taking the pens and mug and shoving them into his backpack. He left the radio and the picture of Jools behind; he didn’t need either.

     A large crow dropped down upon the roof of his car, a mass of straggled feathers the color of coal and hearth stone, and bobbed its head crazily at him, an insinuating look in its tar-black stare. You have lost your mind.

     He looked away into the field behind Stone Surety Mortgage, and smelled the strangely familiar air, a trace of summer flowers and dew clinging to the moist June morning, deceptively close and fleeting, the perfume of a lover that lingers even after she has left you asleep and alone, a note folded upon the pillow.

     What’s stopping you from walking out and never coming back? What is stopping you from calling it quits?

     Nothing.

     Maybe it’s time to catch the next train out of Dodge. Don’t wonder where it’s going; it doesn’t matter, never did. Just climb aboard.

     Maybe I should.

     Maybe ….

     The crow on the car in the parking lot said, “Man, you gotta take a shot.”

     Jack looked up suddenly, but the bird was already winging away, a gangly takeoff of batting black feathers. It flew to the top of a light post, and made a point of ignoring him, as if what it said—that it said anything at all—was meant merely in passing.

     He stared up at it for a time, but the crow did not speak again. Perhaps it never spoke at all. Perhaps you’re losing your mind.

     Jack looked one last time at the greenish pool beneath his car, the beat-up Civic with rusting door panels and a leaking head gasket that he had been so proud of when he bought it his second year of college. He turned, started walking, home seven miles away.

     Without breaking step, he pulled the car keys from his key ring and dropped them on the asphalt. They hit with an empty clinking sound and were forgotten.

     On the light post, the crow pumped its head up and down in what might have been a gesture of agreement.

     Or it might have been nothing at all.

     It was a day like any other because, like any other day, there has never been one like it before or since.

     The devil is in the details.

                                                  * * *

     Two miles in, the sky made good its promise. Clouds thickened to sheets of gray slate, and Jack found himself caught in a downpour, rain soaking his drab suit and inexpressive tie, puddles ruining his shoes.

     Drenched, he escaped into a nearby coffee shop.