The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Read online

  So this is the way the world goes, Andrew thought, echoing T.S. Eliot. Andrew’s whole existence was consumed by his own needs, his own wants. Who cared about storms and snow and everything else? Who cared at all about anything? She had betrayed him! Betrayed him!

  At the sound of approaching footsteps, his fingers reflexively toggled a report he kept in the background just before his supervisor poked his head around the corner. There was no one left in Stone Surety Mortgage who cared about wasting company time—and he knew that, dammit! —but habit, like fear, died 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, confused by the observation. “I guess.”

  “I called you around seven-thirty, but you must have left already.”

  Jack nodded. Already they had traded more words then they did on most days, and some weeks. “Why? What’s up?”

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

  Jack stared, confused, as if Henry had been speaking in tongues

  “It happened after everyone left last night,” Henry pressed on. “Video surveillance shows someone just walked in off the street through the loading dock doors. So the company’s feeling a little … vulnerable this morning. They want to tighten up security, keep all personnel not involved with the transfer and shutdown of operations out of 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 him, his eyes losing focus.

  “Of course, this won’t affect your payout,” Henry added quickly. “You’re still considered a full-time employee here for the next sixty days. You can just use this time to start your job search a little earlier, or something.”

  Jack smiled appreciatively, appropriately, betraying nothing.

  “This isn’t about you, Jack. The company just needed a blanket policy that would cover all employees objectively. I didn’t even find out about this myself until I got in this morning. I tried to call you, but I guess you already left. Still, 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,” Henry said, the silence turning awkward, “there are some spare boxes over by the filing cabinets you can use for packing up any personal things.”

  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. But it wasn’t okay, either. Jack had not only been labeled harmless, but also 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 some goddamn office boy 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 he would do it. He would pack up his desk, turn off his—the! —computer, and leave. He wouldn’t 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. I won’t take long.”

  “No need to hurry,” Henry said with a good-natured smile.

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

  He turned back to the computer, and made a show of saving and closing files. He ignored Henry Leeds, hoping he would simply go away. Jack had no use for him now. He didn’t need a shoulder to cry on, or a sounding board to help him cope. What he needed was normalcy, and he wasn’t going to get it here.

  When he turned back, his supervisor had disappeared, quietly, as if he had never been.

  What little he managed to gather in two years, he loaded 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, of course, but a prefab cube just the same; easily torn down when the use for it ceased. Stone Surety no longer felt like reality. It felt like Studio Lot B the day after shooting finished on a movie set. Soon, the sets would be broken down and reassembled for the next project—the role of supervisor will be played by … “You have my number, right Jack?” Henry said. “Call me if you need anything, okay. Good luck.”

  Jack nodded and wished him the same. It wasn’t until he unclipped his ID card and left it on the receptionist’s desk 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, his hands still shaking as he started across the near-empty lot.

  And there he stopped, staring in disbelief, the meager box of possessions hanging limp in one hand, as a widening puddle of florescent green pooled beneath the front of his car like some B-movie alien slime. He knew nothing about cars, but even he knew 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 anymore.

  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, perched, and made a point of ignoring him, as if what it had said—that it had 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 he was losing his mind.

  Jack looked one last time at the pool of green beneath his car, the beat-up, used 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, and started walking; home was seven miles away. He did not look back, he simply walked, pulling the car keys from his key ring and dropping them on the asphalt. They hit with an empty clinking sound and were forgotten.

  On the light post, the crow was pumping its head up and down in what m
ight 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 sudden downpour, rain soaking his drab suit and inexpressive tie, puddles ruining his black shoes. Drenched, he escaped into a nearby coffee shop.

  RASPBERRY-MOCHA LATTÉ

  Café Tangier was little more than a corner coffee nook: half a dozen barstools lined up before a narrow counter looking out one picture window, a gaggle of tables staring out the other, surfaces of green and black marble trimmed in brass, smoked-mirrors offering the illusion of space where there was none. The espresso steamer hissed quietly as Jack stood dripping in the entryway, water trickling through his hair and down his back, making his skin itch. A rawboned man with red hair and a smallish woman looked up from behind the counter, pleasant faces expressing polite surprise while their only customer, an old man, sat at one of the small tables near the door, staring at Jack over a raised cup, steam lifting gently off the foam.

  “Looks like you got yourself caught in the downpour,” the woman observed. “Did your car break down?”

  It was not an unreasonable assumption. Why else would someone dressed in a suit and tie be out dashing in the rain? But his reality had expanded considerably, and the world was not so reasonable a place as he once believed.

  Not that anyone else would understand. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

  “Would you like a cup of coffee? We’ve got a pot of hazelnut brewing, and the Kenyan dark roast’s already made.”

  Jack was about to nod when the old man interrupted. “I’ll take care of that if you’ll do me the favor of a little conversation. Join me at my table?”

  The round-faced woman turned to Jack, offering him the same questioning stare the old man wore. “Uh, sure,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Marvelous,” the old man said, and extended a towel as white as a ream of paper bearing the logo of the Sheraton Inns hotel chain. “Why don’t you dry yourself off?” And to the woman behind the counter, he said, “Two raspberry-mocha lattés, please; one for me and one for my new friend.” He seemed about to reach for his wallet when he realized he was still holding the towel. “Go ahead, take it. It appears the rain got the better of you. I suspect your shoes are ruined. The suit, too, probably. Were they expensive?”

  “A little, I guess,” Jack answered, taking the towel. The man wore a white sports coat, badly faded jeans that did not seem to fit him altogether well, and a button-down, red-and-white candy-striped shirt. He looked like a man trying to retire and struggling with the dress code. “But I don’t expect I’ll need them anymore, anyway.”

  “No?” the old man asked curiously as Jack sopped water from his face. “Planning a change of avocation?”

  “I think my avocation planned on changing me,” Jack remarked, pressing water from his hair with the towel. “I want to change back.”

  The man paused on his way to the table, and turned, a smile edging on his face. “Now that is a remarkably clever answer to an otherwise ridiculous question.” He sported a small white mustache and a ring of cottony hair around an otherwise balding head. Small, round-framed glasses made his the face of a southern gentleman who should have been drinking iced-tea splashed with gin, not espressos or raspberry-mocha lattés.

  “You mind if I ask why you care?”

  “I’d be very surprised if you didn’t. I’m a writer, you see. Actually, I’m the Writer, so stories naturally pique my curiosity; the more unusual the better. Now when I look at you, a young man in a wool suit—impractical attire for the first day of summer, by the way—rushing into a coffee shop to escape the rain, I’m curious as to what makes him do it. Then when that same young man tells me his job is changing him, and he wants to change himself back, well, you can understand how someone like me would naturally want to know a little more about the story.” He flashed the same amiable smile as he sat down at his table and gestured for Jack to do the same. “Please, tell me a little about yourself.”

  The red-haired man came around the counter with two tall lattés, the thick glass cups still steaming, the drink buried beneath a mountain of frothed milk and whipped cream sprinkled with ground chocolate. The Writer—really, who calls themselves the Writer? —thanked him, and slid one of the cups towards Jack, some of the whipped cream already melted and running down the side. “There you are, my boy, a raspberry mocha latté. They’re delicious, believe me.”

  And against all sense or reason, Jack did. He leaned down to inhale the aroma of chocolate-laced coffee with raspberry while warming his hand on the sides of the cup.

  “I suppose introductions are in order,” the old man said, extending his hand. “As I mentioned, I’m the Writer. And your name?”

  “Jack,” he said, reaching out to shake the Writer’s hand.

  “Good to make your acquaintance, Jack,” the Writer said.

  “Likewise,” Jack nodded

  “So, Jack,” the Writer began, “how did you find yourself to be running around in the rain on this first day of summer wearing a wool suit that says you should already be at an office somewhere, staring out a window and daydreaming of being someplace else? Did you have a fight with the boss? Or chance upon a winning lottery ticket? Or have things taken a stranger turn?”

  Jack sipped cautiously at the latté, a deliberate diversion while he considered his answer. The Writer had not lied; it was delicious. Dark chocolate and coffee with the tart-sweet taste of raspberry and the silky texture of whip cream, it was like a holiday truffle, rich and decadent, evoking pleasant memories, half-real, half make-believe. “Well,” he said, “So far this has definitely been a day like no other.”

  The Writer leaned forward, inviting him to continue.

  “The company I worked for was sold off last week. As of this morning, I am officially out of a job. And all I have to show for it is right here.” He patted the rain-soaked backpack lightly. “And the funny thing is there isn’t all that much. I guess two years doesn’t buy you as much as I thought it would.”

  “But you’ll be looking for another job, surely,” the Writer observed. “A young man loses his job, it’s an opportunity to test the field, to advance himself, get something better. Wouldn’t you need a suit and tie for your upcoming interviews?”

  “I’m not sure I want to keep doing what I was doing. It was a job, you know, but I don’t think it’s what I was meant for.”

  “Ah, the change of avocation,” the Writer nodded. “All these years doing something you didn’t care about, waiting for the opportunity to go after the thing you did care about; just so much wasted time. But now opportunity’s thrust upon you. So what was it you wanted to do that you couldn’t do before?”

  Jack considered the question longer than he needed, self-conscious about admitting to his real desire; it was impractical, even foolish. But then, where was the harm in telling a complete stranger he would likely never see again after today? Just idle chitchat over coffee. “What I really want to be is a writer. I always have. I just haven’t had a lot of opportunity.”

  “A noble pursuit,” the Writer remarked. “But demanding. And difficult to get into all on your own. It can make for a lot of lean years, sleepless nights, an empty belly, and thankless jobs to keep up the rent.”

  Jack sighed, and took a drink from the latté. “I suppose you’re right.”

  The Writer nodded thoughtfully, and said, “Well perhaps it was fate that the rain drove you in here when it did.”

  “How so?”

  The Writer leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers knitted together. “Because I may have just the thing you need, the proverbial answer to all of your problems and dreams. You need a job, and it just so happens that I have a job opening to fill.”

 
; “What does that have to do with me wanting to be a writer?”

  “Because that’s what the job entails.”

  A little voice in Jack’s head threw out a proverb about how things that seemed too good to be true usually weren’t. “Why would you offer me a writing job? We just met. You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Nonsense. I already know plenty about you. You don’t have a job. You don’t have any prospects. You want to be a writer, but you don’t know how to go about it. I’d even go so far as to wager that you have some of your writing on you right now, just in case someone asks to see it.” The Writer gave him an inquisitive stare.

  “That’s not that big a leap,” Jack remarked.

  “No, but I’m right all the same. And I’ll even go so far as to say that while you are carrying almost nothing with you, you not only have some samples of your writing, you also have a pen and some blank paper, in case inspiration hits you. Am I right?”

  Jack thought on the notebook he carried, the pack of pens he stole from Stone Surety Mortgage, the USB drive with all of his writing projects—such as they were. “Yes. So what? It doesn’t tell you whether I’m any good, does it?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You can’t find out about a writer by his resume, or by learning where he went to school. You have the desire, Jack. Now you just need to find out if you can apply it. And it just so happens, I know of just such a place where you can find out.”

  “I still don’t know why you think I’d be the right person for this job, whatever it is.”

  “Because my time here is short, Jack,” the Writer said. “I have things to do, and not a lot of time left to do them in. I’ve gotten old, and more and more often, I’m just tired. I want to retire. I have this place where I write; it’s perfect. There’s no place quite so ideal in the whole world.” The Writer seemed to lose his focus for a moment, staring intently out the window, captivated by the rain splattering against the sidewalk. “Sorry, woolgathering. Anyway, this is the most perfect place in all the world to write. If there is a writer in you, Jack, then this is the place that will bring it out. On the other hand, it may simply confirm beyond all doubt that you aren’t to be. No guarantees, you understand. It will simply let you know one way or the other. The upside is that this could help you realize your dream. The downside is that it might kill your dream forever. Do you understand?”