"The Sanity's Edge Saloon"

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Chapter 1: A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER

     Summer began like any other day, Jack’s routine calcified over time, the permanence of words etched in stone.

     He awoke at six and got ready for work, donned a drab-gray suit, black shoes, an inexpressive tie. After breakfast, he rinsed the dishes and left them in the sink. He would wash them after dinner and leave them in the rack to dry overnight, so he could do it all over again tomorrow. Just like usual. Just like every morning. Five days a week every week. At ten after seven, he was headed for Stone Surety Mortgage, and by 7:33, he was parked in the company’s south lot.

     There was security in routine, in its precision, in the semblance of normalcy it represented. Routine becomes ritual, every day like clockwork, order overseeing the tedium of the mundane, leaving his mind free to roam the halls of his imagination. At twenty-five, Jack Lantirn was already killing time.

     Clockwork is inherently fragile, gears inflexible, the unbending quality of the springs. A machine, once broken, is ruined forever, discarded and 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 it is believed in most.

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

     Unknowing, Jack Lantirn stared absently at a layer of gray pushing into the blue, the wind electrified, heat of the approaching storm.

     He thought he should have called in sick. No one needed a report analyst for a broken company, no matter what they said. But Jack never called in sick.

     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 hard or not at all; neither had a future with Stone Surety Mortgage.

     Part of the latter, Jack spent the last three weeks doing 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, dutifully tending a dying job.

     He walked in 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 walked past dark rows of empty cubicles once loud with telemarketing reps. No one even bothered to turn on the lights in this part of the building anymore.

     But 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.

     Being trustworthy, Jack discovered, was not 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 you could be trusted to do exactly what was expected, and nothing more.

     And on that day when the company expected him to walk away without raising a fuss, Jack 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 it was wiped clean, empty.

     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 lost his mind. It might have said all that and been true.

     But this was simpler: Today is Tuesday.

     Another day closer to unemployment. Surfing job-search sites, trying to set up first interviews, asking people 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, worked him more, and put off his dreams of being a writer a little longer.

     Thinking about it made him sick.

     So he tried very hard not to.

     Denial.

     It was a day like any other.

     A 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—I should have seen this coming—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 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 and shiny. What’s stopping me from leaving? From simply getting up from this chair, walking out the door, and never coming back? Not to my job or my 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 me from simply leaving?

     The question occurred to him 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.

     They would meet at Finnegan’s Pub every Friday after work, part of Jack’s comfortable clockwork. He arrived early—nothing at the office to 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, a misunderstanding on his part—He’s probably just a friend, a relative perhaps. And Jools is affectionate, demonstrative; a kiss means nothing. She’s my girlfriend, after all. Six months now. Hardly a lifetime, but it means something. I should—

     Jools leaned into his 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 Jack standing there, watching, doing nothing. No surprise or guilt in her expression, only resignation.

     He nearly collided with the doorframe as he tried to escape, pulse deafening, hands shaking. He walked uneasily to his car, drove home in silence, hands tightening upon the wheel until his knuckles ached. Back at his apartment, he collapsed, 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 more than ever. 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, but he did care about Jools. He was an unfocused dreamer doomed to be utterly ordinary, utterly forgettable, a hapless victim of his own mediocrity. Julie Eden—she nicknamed herself Jools; said it sounded exotic—was everything Jack could ever imagine in a woman. Extraordinary. Beautiful. Bright. Exciting. Jools had a few tattoos, a few piercings—not all in her ears. What she saw in him, he never understood, and never allowed himself to think on too hard.

     It would have surprised him to learn that Julie Eden was not so different, a romantic who believed in the adage that still waters run deep. A self-professed writer, Jack sounded exciting. At first. Unrealized potential. Raw clay to be molded and shaped, his inner qualities coaxed to the surface. But when Jools 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 ideaof 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 empty online blog.

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

     But that was rare.

     He heard the door unlock, and Jools walked in, looked at him sitting in the darkness. “Can we talk?”

     He didn’t answer.

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

     Light from outside turned her to shadows and lines. “How did you want me to find out?”

     “I wasn’t really sure how to tell you. This isn’t easy for me.”

     Hmm. Maybe this was his fault.

     “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 I disappointed you.” He’d hoped for a scathing remark, but it came out like a sincere apology.

     “It wasn’t you, really. I just expected something … more. For a while, I thought I was okay with it. But I’m not. 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. I couldn’t bear it if you hated me.”

     The break in her voice was the cruelest thing he could imagine. Cruel because it dangled hope before him, and Jack swam eagerly towards it. 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, wanted to 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,” Jools said, stepping closer, kneeling down in the chair atop him. “Please say you won’t hate me, Jack. Please.”

     In that moment, Jack concocted elaborate myths of how Jools would fall back in love with him, how she would see his commitment and forget this other guy, make love to him tonight and stay with him forever. And everything would be as it was.

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

     He woke up alone, tangled in sheets that smelled of spent lust and Jools’ perfume, a note 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.

     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, the superstitious primitive stamping around the fire, petitioning the night sky and casting chicken’s blood into the blaze. His ritualistic dance was the daily grind, his work that no longer existed. Bored at his desk, he wrote every day and saved it on a thumb drive. This to keep him from going mad, losing his mind, standing up and walking the hell out of everything. What is keeping me here? The routine. The routine would bring back normalcy, restore reality.

     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 really his computer. No more than it was hiscubical, 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 page he kept in the background just as his supervisor poked his head around the corner. Fear, like any habit, dies a hard, slow death.

     “Hey, Jack. I didn’t expect to find you here this early,” Henry said. “You must leave your place before eight, huh?”

     “Usually.” Jack shrugged, having already traded more words with his boss than he did on most days, and some weeks. “Why? What’s up?”

     “Well, something happened last night.” Henry looked about awkwardly, then lowered his voice. “Someone broke in. Stole some equipment.”

     Jack stared back 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 felt his 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 mechanically, 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, silence turning uncomfortable, “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, that he understood. It wasn’t his fault.

     It wasn’t anyone’s fault.

     Before today, Jack was harmless. Now, he was also worthless. Four years of college, two years on the job, countless hours of unpaid overtime, 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 was wrong. If Jack didn’t leave now, right away, he might find himself doing something … unpredictable; breaking his routine; breaking.

     He turned away, made a show of closing files. 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 framed 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 once it outlived its usefulness. 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 he unclipped his ID card and left it with the receptionist at the front desk that it hit him: his job was over; finished, The End in bold letters. He felt something between numbness and 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, the box of meager possessions limp in one hand.

     Beneath the front of his car, a widening puddle of florescent green like some slick of diseased lemonade.

     He knew little 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 sailed away into the darkness, taking Jack Lantirn with it.

     It was not even nine o’clock.

     Leaving the box on the hood of the car, he took the pens and the mug and shoved them into his backpack. He left behind the radio and the picture of Jools.

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

     You have lost your mind.

     Jack looked away to the field behind Stone Surety Mortgage, 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 me from walking out and never coming back? What’s stopping me from calling it quits? 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, 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.

     Jack stared up at it for a time, but the crow did not speak again. Perhaps it never spoke at all. Perhaps I’m losing my mind.

     He looked one last time at the yellow-green slick 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. Then he started walking, home seven miles away. He pulled the car keys from his key ring and dropped them on the asphalt. An empty clinking sound, and they 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.

                                         * * *

     Two miles in, the sky made good its promise, clouds thickening 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.

     He escaped into a nearby coffee shop.