J. M. Gardner Goes to Hell (part 1 of ??)

Known for its role in regulating the sleep cycle and producing vivid dreams, it is a little-known fact that melatonin is also suspected of making the human brain more open to superstition and suggestion. That quiet moment at 2 A.M. during which a skeptic believes in ghosts, that hour of weakness during which a devout Pagan believes in Hell- perhaps it's just the high melatonin levels. It kept humankind out of trouble in the early days when predators stalked the night, then became a nuisance.

Jade Marilyn Gardner had an erratic sleep schedule, and she already believed in ghosts. It was 2 A.M. and the world was closing in, the quiet was strangling, the quiet was Hell. Everyone she knew was in bed. She was out of whiskey, out of riddles to solve, and out of energy to do anything else- out of distractions. Melatonin as a supplement was illegal in Canada; there wasn't even that. Just the natural levels of it she imagined coursing through her system, making her think foolish thoughts.

"It's just a day," she mumbled aloud to herself, though it came out with all the conviction of "I have read and agree to the terms and conditions." She was turning twenty tomorrow, but it was just a day. Jade had laid aside her notebook and pen, and under them were six groups of tightly-clustered knife marks in the table. The dimly lit living-room had never seemed less lived-in.

"It's just a day," she repeated, a little louder, "and I'm just being sappy, and dancing's just for boring people." It was 2 A.M. and the world was closing in. "Loss is just change, global warming's just the end of the world, and the past is just a story." She turned her empty glass of Crown Royal upside-down on the open W page of an encyclopedia. "Winston Churchill's just a bully," she added irritably.

The small woman got up, taking the whiskey bottle by its short neck. She tried to walk a straight line to the sink with moderate success, for the bottle had been drained for quite a while now. She filled it with water and lit a candle. Flicking the sole light off, she sat down and put the bottle in front of her. There was always something red added- blood or pomegranate juice, for the courage ritual. Then, Jade stared into its contents.

"I build a house on the heads of my enemies," she said flatly. "I build a house on the heads of my enemies, I build a house on the heads of my enemies..."

It was 2 A.M., and the world was closing in.
***

Sitting alone at the table, she studies a roomful of warmth and murmurs. The light is strange- a wine bottle used as a candle-holder here, a fluorescent bulb there. There are people at nearly every table, though many of them sit next to or across from an empty chair, or both. Breath catches in her throat, she looks up. Strange.

A medieval minstrel plucks a harp and sings in a language Jade doesn't speak, and Kurt Cobain screams and shreds with him in a decidedly weird duet. The anarchist Emma Goldman slow-dances with a mohawked teenager. Albert Camus sits engaged in conversation with Bertolt Brecht. Near the middle of the room, someone is touching the screen of their iPhone, and at the table across from her someone presses the golf-tee shapes of cuneiform into a clay tablet.

"Don't look so pale, little one," says a postmenopausal woman, plump but not fat, grey-haired and smiling in an apron. "Time and place are all stewed together here for the sake of our patrons and their thoughts."

Jade looks up in shock. "I walk by an odd-looking house and imagine what life is like for its occupants," she says, "but this?"

"The better to think with, my dear. What'll it be?"

"Umm," says Jade, stalling. "I don't think I've got any money."

The pub's owner laughed without mocking. "You don't get it, do you? This is the underworld, child. You pay me in talk, but the difficult kind."

Jade is silent.

"I'll tell you what," said the older woman. "I'll leave you here to think, and have Angelica come by later to check up on you." She turns to go, scooping up Brecht's empty beer glass.

"Wait!" cries the birthday girl. The proprietress turns to look at her in response. "Who are you?"

"Why, you know who I am," says The Proprietress. "Just think about it."

With a heartfelt sigh, Jade rests her head heavily on her hands. She stays like that for a long time, eyes closed. Then she lifts her gaze, holding in a deep breath, and looks around.

Ernest Hemingway is seated in a corner. He's got paper, a pen, a bottle, a glass and a gun. That doesn't look good. She imagines him writing about suicide there without ever mentioning suicide, or maybe since this is part of the Lower World it's metaphysical suicide now.

"Hey there, handsome," says a voice. It's syrupy, full, feminine.

When Jade ignores the speaker- assuming her to be talking to any one of the numerous men in the room- a set of fingers snaps in front of her eyes, making her head turn rapidly in the stranger's direction. Angelica turns out to be a young woman, Spanish by the looks of it, strawberry-lipped, one hand on her hip in the eternal gesture of the impatient waitress.

The newcomer turns out to be a young man, Canadian or American by the way he talks, crew-cut, and in his eyes the supernaturally-enabled Angelica detects the universal stamp of the wounded veteran.

There's a long pause before her brain gets to working again. "Hi." A beat, an awkward blink. "I'm. You look nice. Were you talking to me?"

Angelica meets his eyes, unflinching. "Yes, you. What's a gold-hearted boy like you doing among losers like these?"

"Oh. Um. I'm... Not a boy?" Jade looks down at her respectable C-cups in confusion. Soft tresses of hair fall alongside them, disheveled now but recognizably unmanly.

"Of course." Angelica laughs a little. "You're all man by now, I'd say. Anything I can get you?"

"What helps thinking," a perplexed Jade asks, "besides alcohol?"

"I'd say books," Angelica is grinning. "But I think you want something a little less papery."

Jade takes a deep breath. Holds it, searches herself. Exhales slow. "the act of cheering someone up," she says. She can hear the capital letter's absence.

"Coming right to you," says Angelica with a nod, taking down the order on a notepad.

The lost-in-the-underworld writer stares at her retreating back, or rather the lower side of it. Damn.

There's a word scratched into the table: themes. Jade stares at it, wondering who put it there. A sudden passion siezes her, and she reaches instinctively into her pocket for a pen. She is associated with the colour blue; a deep navy spills from pen to tabletop, glistening in the light of a nearby candle. I had the good fortune, she begins, Of having an English teacher who did not like Ernest Hemingway, so I got to read the wonders of more elaborate writers instead-

Angelica is making her way back to her now, voluptuous and duly heart-shaped.

the act of cheering someone up seems to take the form of a bowl of chicken noodle soup, like you're simply sick instead of mind-sick. Body or mind, sickness is never simple- but then, damned if she knows anything that ever is. The spirit Angelica sets the bowl down directly below the word themes.

"Thank you," he says, looking up. The eyes are brown- holding some strange softness more commonly seen in dogs and deer than mankind. True doe eyes.

"Don't thank me," says Angelica, "pay me." Jade looks up, into her olivetone face. And knows what's expected of her.

"Well, I did it," he begins, throat tight, "because I was afraid my close friends would all forget my birthday. That I would be unloved or alone, or both."

There's a pause, after which Jade realizes she owes more.

"Twenty is... I don't know. I'm aware of the passage of time. I meet kids who went to my high school that I don't know. I remember certain music and movies as being new that I now find out are a decade old. I'm afraid grey hair will magically make me bigoted and stubborn, like past a certain age the mind rejects new paradigms and launches off the deep end. Like it's a death sentence to flexibility and dissent, a farewell to the possibility of martyrdom.

A hundred years ago, a dying person knew the world would get on without them. That things would get better and worse, and better again and worse again and nothing would ever really end, just evolve. You felt like a cell in the body of the Infinite. Spring after winter after autumn after summer. Now that isn't certain anymore. It's more important to be loved than ever," he finishes. "That's my central concern."

"You tip well, lost one," says Angelica. "Namaste."

"Namaste, beautiful one," says Jade.

And then Angelica's red dress blends into the colourful crowd.