Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  A recollection came to him as he sat there, one he had nearly forgotten. But one he realized was actually always swimming just below the surface of things. It was always there, in the background, waiting to grab on to him in those lulls, those empty spaces when the everyday was at bay for an instant. And on this night, the memory rushed back at him like water; he was held in its grip. There was a sense of longing in it, a yearning to turn around now, to run back to it, and fix it.

  There was a boy, younger than he, and Zeb was standing over him with his own large shadow falling across him. They were both outside in a cool, dark world, surrounded by whispering trees, on the edge of a moment that seemed forever ago and far away. But the memory of that Portuguese boy, looking up at him with teary eyes and disbelief, was interrupted by a scuffling noise—something completely in the present pulled him forward.

  The sound came from down at the end of the stock room, close to the side doors, a set of metal ones that needed a key to disable the fire alarm that would ring if you pushed them open. There was a short pause and then the scuffle came again, a little louder, a little more pronounced.

  Zeb shook off the memory of the dark-skinned little boy—he would do that a few more times in his life before it left him for good—and he got up from his crate. He crept along the main aisle way, his head tilting out from his body as if to peer around boxes and leaning canvas, and when he got to the end, he found a small black bird, clawing and gnawing with his beak on an old shred of cardboard. He was on the cement floor facing away from Zeb, bouncing the way birds do.

  Oliverthecrow! No, it wasn’t Oliver, at least Zeb didn’t think it was. That didn’t seem to make sense; Oliverthecrow was restrained, almost passive. This bird was agitated, irritated. It was making an enemy of the cardboard scrap even though it was nearly twice his size. When the edgy little thing finally whirled half-way around to see Zeb looking at him on the other side of the boxes, it leapt into the air at him. CawCAWCAW, it screamed, and the sound was close in that little space. It swooped up towards him and he felt like the bird was going to spear him with his beak. When he moved his head in a reflex that seemed laughably ineffective, he swore its bristly feathers brushed a cheek.

  His heart jumped and the startle the crow had thrown into him hooked on to every piece of his body, making already shaky extremities feel like they were coated in a layer of bees. He was now an anxious jellied thing with extra arms and legs that felt immediately clumsy. His heart beat in his neck and he could feel it in his wrists too. The bird paused on a high stack of boxes, fell silent for a moment, and Zeb looked up at it with his hands awkwardly held above his head like a shield. It looked yellow at that moment. Its beak and legs were still shiny black but the feathers all over, the ones that were black only a second before, were now completely yellow, a bright sickly shade, like someone had pinned the bird down and doused him in paint the color of a highlighting marker. The little crow’s eyes were a piercing shade of red and that made it an even more ghastly sight. Just as the comprehension that the bird was no longer midnight’s color as it should be, but instead a shrieking shade of gold with ill red eyes, it started cawing and screeching again, like Zeb was the troublemaker and not him.

  The thing swooped at him once more, banged against a wall, then settled. It did this at length, each time making it more and more apparent that he would eventually hit him. Zeb did the only thing he could do: he reached for the nearest of the fire exit’s double doors and leaned his weight on the handle. The fire alarm rang out, a piercing, blaring cry that made the yellow crow seem subdued by comparison. The door swung open and banged against an exterior wall.

  Zeb fell to the ground, covered his head, and peered through a crack in his arms. The crow swooped past him, into the open air of the night past the door. In his wake a little puff of cooler air wafted into the heat that had been consuming the stockroom. Zeb summoned the courage to look past the doorway to see where the yellow monstrosity had gone—to confirm that it was out of there and not coming back to torment him more. But when he looked to the doorway, the sight was an unbelievable landscape. Even with all the things he had seen in his short life, real and unreal, this seemed to be the most immediately extraordinary.

  He stood and moved closer to let his mind comprehend what his eyes were staring at. He walked to the edge of the doorway and teetered on the wooden threshold. His hand instinctively reached out for the metal handle of the doorway, leaned on it, depressed it, and caused the fire alarm to plunge into an unexpected soundlessness. The absence of it came like a rush. But it was immediately followed by a new sound:

  The intense, otherworldly, all-at-once caws of hundreds of black crows. Maybe even thousands of them.

  They coated the back parking lot—a large gravel space shared by tenants of other buildings—with one lamppost that kept it awash in pinkish light. They were perched on adjoining building tops, on eaves, and window sills. They sat on the post, and on cars, trash cans and dumpsters. They were in rows on power lines and atop the wooden poles where couplers, joints, and dampeners sat in tangled confusion. They lined the branches of a giant elm tree that stood at the end of the lane, its arms reaching towards the moon and the navy blue of the sky. And they all screeched and cawed, a jabbering multitude of voices trying to be heard simultaneously.

  Then the cacophony dropped nearly to silence.

  Zeb swallowed. The pause lingered.

  In a rush, and with renewed cawing, the birds, countless black bodies and wings, took flight with a huge whoosh of flapping movement. Some of them seemed to lunge at Zeb, he even flinched back. But they took to the sky, a giant wave, a covering of black shadows against the dark blue backdrop and the glowing-edged clouds. They blotted out the moon... and their voices could still be heard as they ascended.

  V. Where Stillness Has Momentum

  Sebastion heard the flourish of a thousand wings erupting into the intangible sky. And he smelled the aroma of burned tomato soup in a steel pot on the kitchen stove. The Hardwick Turn-of-the-Century that was—the gas unit with white enamel that couldn’t keep a low heat.

  A stranger with ill-intent had entered his home and had found him. A stranger with a gaping hole in his throat who blurted blood instead of words and had stared him down with eyes of death.

  That era, the enormity of it and the infinite smallness of it, clung like an after image beneath Sebastion’s eyelids and would not resurrect. His bedroom was gone. The flash of the officer’s weapon, the sight of the faces hollering over the bare quiet of an underwater world were gone too. And they would not be coming back. The body in which he stood, groped and contorted by the stranger a flash less than a second before, seemed forever banished. For the feel of it, too, was gone.

  But there was not blackness, not emptiness.

  There was something.

  If there was a sense of sight, if one could translate the something which he now faced, it would best be explained as a sheet of longingly empty white. But it wasn’t a page of white, not a stretch of wall that could be reached out and felt, looked on and seen. It was a space that extended to the indefinite. Rather than sensed, it was something to be known. It was a blankness of unlimited depth and uncompromising breadth. And Sebastion knew it in every extremity of himself, in every extenuated toe, in every strand of nerve, in every fingertip’s furthest flake of skin.

  Somewhere far from Sebastion, far, far from him, more sirens screamed, then died. As the atmosphere above that distant city lightened to an ethereal display of white-gray, as fingers of smoke from life-giving chimneys fattened to steely plumes, as night became morning, Sebastion witnessed eternity. It was him and he was it.

  <> <> <>

  The sheet that wasn’t really a sheet metastasized, slowly, into a space with shape and form. There was an up, a down. There was a horizon. There was sky above. And ground below.

  But it did not have edges.

  Sebastion stood on the threshold of a dream. He moved there, inside his own vi
sion. There was no frame around what he saw. He was witnessing this sky and ground as it shifted to either side without boundaries. It was as though it bled in all directions and his sight consumed it all at once.

  It was a bright world, solid. The sky was a tame gray, but vivid as though bursting with a monotonous glow behind it. Below him, running off to the sky in all directions was snow-covered ground. He looked to where it joined the horizon, and he trailed that view back to his own feet: They were below him, as they should be, pale and still, without shoes or socks. Bare and nestled in the flakey snow. That’s when the shock of the cold hit. He brought his hands to his shoulders to try and stave off the coming quivers and they interrupted his view of his feet standing in snow up to ankles. The shivers began to take their hold and he realized his body was whole. It was something he had doubted at first, when the whiteness had dribbled away to reveal a landscape. He didn’t feel his body, it was as though he might be just a floating mind there in that place. And now, as he looked at himself, he realized that there was something there, it was his body, more or less, but it still felt alien, still felt nearly as far away as the bedroom in Vaughan. It had on a crisp white dress shirt and gray wool slacks, a pair he didn’t remember owning. Where they his father’s?

  Up again to the horizon his eyes went, searching for something. He grasped for understanding, clumsily groped for it. He took steps through the snow in no particular direction, tightening his eyes to small slits and concentrating as best he could on the white field in all directions. What is—? Where am—? His mind misfired. It swam in a tub of tepid water that was quickly getting colder, and his feet stung in the snow. The sensations ran sloppily from toes to calves to knees to testicles and upward and his sense of loss became too much to handle. He started to mentally shut down. The energy needed to comprehend seemed nearly too large to undertake so, almost out of retaliation to the size of everything, he tried to hang on to a smaller concept. He started looking for a bare patch of grass, some dirt, a stone, anything he could stand on to relieve his icy feet.

  But there was nothing, only the uneven snow with slight ridges that stood out in a pastel blue. Funny-strange, his mind uttered. Snow looks blue. To think of it, to describe it, anyone would see it as white, would call it white. Always white. But snow actually shows as a very subtle shade of blue...

  The snow, blue or white, white or blue, ran off to the distance every which-way, interrupted by nothing at all, no buildings, no trees, nothing. The still air hung motionless, not making things worse, but not making them any better either. It was inoffensive, plain and the least of his worries, but it pricked in his brain as wrong. It drew into his lungs tasting stale. It didn’t breathe like real air. It was flat and that, on some base level, put a bit of a scare into Sebastion. His mind pawed at the vast emptiness surrounding him, trying with growing frenzy to understand it. There must be a road. A town? Something...?

  He strained to hear faint details. Maybe a noise in the expanse. Anything. Cars, people, a dog barking, the horn of a train? Anything? But there was nothing. Not even the sound of a slight breeze. Not even the pulse of his own throbbing heart in his ears. Just that still, stale air that tasted like something not quite right. He stood on empty ground, an empty man, looking towards a sky that offered nothing and a horizon that promised even less.

  He fell to his knees and wept.

  <> <> <>

  Right around the time Sebastion started to see strings behind all the things in the world, right when he had seen shadows creep into view that, to him, meant everything in the world had a dark and secret force manipulating it, his senses started to wane.

  It wasn’t that he stopped feeling things. But where before a sound would create a certain presence of fingers on his skin, or a song heard in the car would produce a vibrant scope of color and texture for his senses to dwell within, now there was no association.

  The strange tissue he imagined existing inside of him, the one that no one else had been born with, the tissue that ran between his ears and his eyes and his nose and every other part of him, had been severed and thrown out. Only now, the senses went single-file to his brain where they were processed, one by one, on a first come, first serve basis. And it disturbed him.

  There was a certain part of him that had hated how he saw the world. It had been the root of so much disorder. On so many occasions, particularly in his childhood, he would wish for it to go away and never return. Difference was bad. Difference was different.

  But he would always come back to the conclusion that must be true. Had to be true. His Synaesthesia was a good thing. God’s Gift, his mother always said. God’s Gift, Zeb, so you use it. Use it every day. Or don’t bother getting out of bed.

  So after it started to crawl away from him, Zeb left the city.

  He went in search of his own senses, panic-stricken that they had left him for good and he would never see them again. The white-coats had told his mother that the sensations might lesson as he got older, might even go away completely and though he sometimes wished for that aloud, even to Oliverthecrow, deep down, he hoped they would always be there for him. They made things better when they weren’t so good. They made things brighter when the lights went out.

  So he went out past the town of Edan, out to the lake and beyond it, into the rugged hills. He hiked in the thickly wooded spots near a stream he remembered from before—a place where there were no car horns and no television sets. No fluorescent fixtures above his head and no exhaust fumes. He went to a place where there were no signs of human interruption, where he could smell only the pine needle bed under his feet and the fresh water chanting near by, where he could hear only a hawk crying vaguely somewhere above. He lay on the forest’s cool floor for a long time, staring at unseen heaven until the chills of nighttime came to him. There was nothing for that whole epoch until the stars finally winked into existence. It was that navy blue that did it. Blue always did it. Blue was the best. Even after all this time.

  He quickly tried to recall all the most exceptional sensory pleasures he had ever encountered before the feeling blue gave him left. And pleasures arrived. Oh did they arrive! They made him feel like, in only a moment, he had been completely and graciously saved. He even revisited the most evil and debilitating sights, sounds and tastes, because he knew they were just as important. One by one, he checked them each off a mental list. He realized he could, to some extent, to a much lesser extent, reproduce them with memory, out of sheer thought. They were not the same; they were far paler versions. But they were reproductions of a sort nonetheless.

  Relief sluiced over him.

  For, he knew then, that if everything went bad—if everything went to hell—he would still have those colors. Pale colors that didn’t quite shine like blue crayon on an oak table, but ones that were recognizable anyhow.

  <> <> <>

  The shadow fell across him from a place that could not have existed. How could it, when here was nowhere? Sebastion was crouched in an expanse of nothingness, an eternity of empty, and there had been no one for miles in all directions. It was a giant consuming space, making little sense at all, and formed from only three scraps of rationality: up and down and cold.

  Where could the figure have come from? There was nothing but snow and presumably ground somewhere beneath it. But he didn’t have a moment to formulate the entire thought. It was fractionalized and stopped in mid-beat. The figure over took him. Arms ensnared him around the shoulders and it felt like an otherworldly claw. It was the last thing he had expected. Minutes seemed to have passed since his arrival, maybe dozens of them, maybe an hour or more. The time here was funny. Funny in the same way as the heavy cold air in his lungs that didn’t taste quite right. The air that had no smell. Time blurred out the edges of things like how long he had been sobbing, and how long since he had found himself stranded in the middle of this field where nothing existed. It was funny in that way and one could no more put a finger on that kind of time than he could on a tr
ee branch or the hood of a car. Not out here.

  Still, his reflexes were acute. Even to him, this was a revelation. The power of the man earlier seemed distant, and his current fetal crouch, the stance of a doomed and helpless soul, ironically allowed him to rise up, breaking out with his arms flailing like wooden sailing masts suddenly taken with wind. The force threw this shadow-toting thing off his back.

  He spun to realize what it was.

  Though he didn’t know who it was.

  He had expected the bronze skin of the stranger who had attacked him in his house. He had expected maybe even his own father’s face. He had expected someone. But who? Certainly not this man. Not this simple man in a crinkled silken shirt of deep burgundy. Not a man with receding hair, short in stature, who looked more like a session lecturer from York. Or one of the middle-aged doctors that told Sebastion’s mother about his Gift from God in a quiet hallway voice.