Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  Conrad Julius Fairweather was driving the first of the two ambulances to arrive. From the unit he carried two EEG monitors and an airway bag, and his partner, Marlon Smithee, brought the drug box and the yellow oxygen pack slung over a shoulder. He attended to Sebastion first, though he didn’t fully understand why. The officers both had tears welling in their eyes. One stood back with nothing to say, and the other ranted in a manner neither EMT had ever before seen on a call.

  Fairweather’s girlfriend from high school, a girl by the name of Katie Becks, had started calling him Jewels when they were both in the eleventh grade at Lansdowne Comp. She would press her forefinger into the dimple of his chin after teasing him about his angel face and his angel ways to a point where he nearly got irate and then she would say, You know I can get away with it. You love me, Jewels. And that means I can get away with anything.

  He did. And she could. And they both knew it.

  Smithee checked the status of the other victim, the one closer to the window who was missing a great deal of his skull. Neither one had a pulse, but the two EMTs set about procedures on Sebastion anyhow. Jewels did the routine: ripped open Sebastion’s white tee, prepped electrode patches, hooked wires. He opened Sebastion’s mouth and felt a puff of breath escape on his cheek. Marlon radioed to check the arrival time of the second unit, then knelt to assist.

  The officer who had been freaking out began to ease up then. His training apparently had returned him to the place he needed to be and he finally stood back a little.

  Jewels inserted the long steel laryngoscope down Sebastion’s throat as another set of sirens could be heard: another two cruisers and the second ambulance. He found a vein and injected epinephrine, followed by a shot of atrophene. There was only a flat line on the monitor...

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  This world was the Thief’s. It belonged to him, had even been created by him. From Sebastion’s glimpse he understood now that it was nowhere he had ever been before, nowhere that could be pointed to on a map, and perhaps nowhere that could even be pointed to in a darkened sky of scattered stars. This was something different, something new to him, and a great deal trickier to wrap his mind around. There were rules; he sensed that there had to be. A world where there is an up and a down had to have rules.

  The glimpse of himself from the eyes of the Thief had told him that. It was a view of an entire page all at once, but when he concentrated, Sebastion realized he could see certain phrases written on that page. The phrases weren’t English, weren’t even made from words. They were more like pictures or vague ideas of things, all strung together on a taught fishing line, against a white backdrop. They were getting bleary, these phrases, starting to wane in their crispness. His thinking was wooly, darkening.

  And none of it really mattered anyway. Rules meant nothing if you didn’t know how to play by them. The Thief was on top of him, squeezing the life from his body—if it even was a body here—and making the lights in his head muted. The world was covered in gray and the discovery of the rules might not come in time. And if they did? What would it matter?

  Sebastion had been wrong: he had thought this average-looking man, this thief, could have nothing to do with this place. But he had everything to do with it.

  Strike, blip.

  That flash occurred again, a little longer. Titanium white and hints of silver. This time a reprieve in the force at his throat came with it. It was subtle, but there. It was quick but allowed his consciousness to pull back towards the world of ice and snow, back into that spot on the icy, rocky precipice. In the flash he saw himself, eyes nearly closed, then suddenly opened, and he saw the rocks beyond himself and far below. Gray. No color. Just shades of gray.

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  Jewels gave the victim another epi. There was no steam inside the clear plastic oxygen mask strapped over his mouth and there was no upward movement on the monitor either. Smithee brought out the paddles, handed them to Jewels, and powered them. A squeal accompanied their activation. “Clear.” He shocked the body laying at the foot of the bed. It stiffened like a set of two-by-fours, and heaved, back arching up from the bloodied carpet.

  “Move clear.”

  Another squeal of electricity in the paddles, another shock from the defibrillator. A set of eyes stared with emptiness at the ceiling. The body’s stiff heave was less than it was with the first ply of current. Its back didn’t lift from the floor. On the EEG, a flat green line.

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  ...He couldn’t help but think of her. She was reading poetry, reading to him, reading The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot, reading that part about the pool among the rock, reading that further part about looking up ahead at the white road and seeing three figures instead of two...

  It was the sight of those rocks from inside his captor’s eyes that caught Sebastion’s consciousness. He was nearly gone when it did so, but a nagging shot of that gray on gray below kept a little piece of his thought alive. There are rules here. In a world where there is up and down, there are rules. If not for that last flash when the choke-hold eased up for a brief second, he would have gone completely under. Only because of it could he now have a fighting chance at letting his mind wander over a thought. Where was the blue?

  When he had craned backwards to see the waves and sprawling ocean waters, there had been color. From his own point of view, imagined or not, there had definitely been color. The rocks had blue in them, the water didn’t, but the rocks did have blue in them. Blue for sure.

  And those other things, the long pieces. They were branches or human limbs, he wasn’t sure which, but there had been color in them. Faint and pale and distant. But it was color. Sebastion knew color. He had lived with color all his life.

  Had lived with it, that is, until it began to fade near the end of university, but it had come roaring back when the stranger had entered his house. There had been a yellow wash on things as he tried to dial the phone—a wash he knew all too well, but one he hadn’t seen for a great long while. And when those icy hands grabbed hold of his neck and hauled him up to look on that empty, flaccid face, the yellow had washed away to a nauseous coating of orange—the worst color of them all.

  But here, through the eyes of the Thief, there was no color.

  To him, this world was as blank as a freshly stretched canvas. To Zeb, even, it was bland and flat; waves crashed without sound and the air was tasteless and stale. There was no lick of ozone, no scent of pollen, dust, or car exhaust. Not even the smell of snow. Yes, he thought, snow has its own smell and I can’t even get a hint of that. I did see blue... The rocks wore blue. The Thief’s eyes didn’t register it, didn’t convey those pink-hued limbs either. Inside the Thief there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. There were no senses there. If he created this world, he mustn’t know how to experience them because, for him, they just don’t exist. The realization was a tumult, and his mind chased after the next question: What would happen if he did sense things?

  Sebastion let his eyes fall shut completely. He felt like he had one last breath of the pale, flat air to draw in, but he held on to the one he had. His concentration was at its peak but he didn’t know if his body would support his decision when he needed it do several things at once.

  He waited, a few seconds, maybe a minute—time was funny here—until he thought the fade would grab him again and pull him under. The stranger’s hands were tightening further and he let his relax, even moved them completely away from the Thief’s. They fell, listless, to his own chest. This seemed to make the Thief, eyes alight, press harder. Where did his energy come from? It has no end. He is relentless.

  The next flash of white came when Sebastion could no longer keep from falling into the consuming blackness. It flared bright across everything and he sucked in what little air he could through the tight straw of his throat.

  They traded eyes.

  And Sebastion threw everything he had ever seen, heard and felt, into the mind whose windows he was looking through.

  He
willed himself to recall how the color orange felt, what sound was made in his ears the day a pot of boiling water fell on him. Shiny black misshapen shingles, the tell-tales of someone’s anger and distrust, fell on him from somewhere above. He pulled into his mind the sights of orgasm: purple and silver orbs bursting across a landscape where violins and trumpets and giant booming drums wailed and throbbed with thunderous volume. He listened to three full blasts of the house music he used to hear at the clubs he and Jackson and Vivian would sneak into. He let its flashing brilliance overtake him and he let it run like hands crawling on his skin, like shivers through the marrow of his spine. His scalp was afire under his hair, just like it always was when he heard those throbs.

  The Thief’s hands faltered. His eyes snapped shut. And his head tilted back as though the flames were snaking at the roots of his own hair. The noises and sights and the caress of unseen flames on his skull caught him. He howled inside his head at the turmoil and the shock.

  Sebastion fell back to his own point of view, braced his fists as tight balls on his chest and struck them against the insides of the Thief’s wrists which burst from their grip on Sebastion’s throat.

  He bucked and heaved. His back arched and his knees kicked up. Rearing towards the gray sky, he threw the Thief off of him. And he sucked and clawed with his throat to fill it with air, to fill himself back up again. He got awkwardly to his knees, scrambled away on hands and bare feet, leaving lines drawn behind him in the bluish-white snow...and then he was gone.

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  Jewels injected another shot of epinephrine, then powered up the paddles. This would be it. One last shock, then they would call it.

  “Clear.”

  The body launched upwards. The EEG glowed with life. The flat, piercing, constant tone from the monitor disappeared. It was replaced with a rhythmic, pulsing beep. Green line up and down.

  “No goddamn way.”

  Smithee had turned to the second EEG hauled into the house. Its electrodes were adhered on the second victim’s chest, and it too held a green line, solid up and down, though weak and sporadic.

  The second set of techs arrived with a gurney, and Jewels Fairweather called at them to take Sebastion; he and Smithee would carry on with this one. Two in one night, Jewels thought. Are we gonna bring two back from the dead in one fuckin’ night?

  VI. Two Birds and One Stone

  The Thief didn’t waste any time.

  There wasn’t any left.

  The bullet hole in his throat, the buzzing in his ears, all of it, told him that. Told him he needed to step things up a mite and set wheels in motion.

  That moniker, the Thief, was about as good as any other name he had been called over the last several years. It summed things up, he supposed. But as he saw it, his thievery was the most justifiable sort. The name would stick for a while. To him at this point, names were about as empty as the vessels they stood for.

  Theif caught hold of his fresh title like a long strand of twine in the beak of a ranting bird. The Theif: it had been underlined text, black on white, across the mind of this most recent one—the one who seemed to call himself Zeb in his own head—when the two traded sight with each other at the precipice. He had seen that, had seen other things. Looking into that boy’s mind had been an unexpected punch in the gut, leveling everything that had finally seemed to be working.

  There was anger at this Zeb. Hate bobbed to the surface of his mind, feeling awkward and no longer isolated. In a long time, he had not felt these emotions. Hate and anger usually stood secluded on the outskirts. He usually faced what he had to do with solemnity. It’s not their fault, he would think. In the beginning, maybe, but not now. Now it was just more cases of Wrong Place, Wrong Time. And yet, when he had fallen away to his icy spot with this boy Zeb, it had pushed him all the way back to that night when the field of ice and snow had been borne. It had brought anger from its distant perch right up to the window, had pressed its face against the glass like a cheeky bully with nothing but time—even after the last school bell has rung.

  With almost a headshake at his own stupidity he had realized that the house had not been empty. No car in the driveway, no footsteps in the snow that had fallen the day before, no mail in the box, so no one home, right? Wrong. The pale light in that one bedroom where he had looked in and saw the bleak outline of a doorway, a cluttered bureau and only a small section of the room’s bedsheets, meant that was wrong. An ignored TV with the volume low and tower speakers voicing a beguiling hiss of white meant that was wrong. A shut-in perhaps? An invalid with groceries in the cupboard and no one to visit? The specifics didn’t matter. The buzz in his head, mostly behind his ears he decided, had muddied his thoughts, and sirens he had suddenly heard again made him realize that things were going all to hell. Just like so many times before.

  His more complete understanding of that came as he staggered down the hallway back in the direction of the room where he had lain on the mattress nearly defeated. The buzzing would ruin everything and the blood from his wound, and spilling from his lips, meant that his last chance was approaching. No one home, right? Wrong. Completely wrong.

  When he had moved into the front-facing bedroom and grabbed Zeb he could barely stand. This was nearly it for him—he could feel it all draining away. But there had been no fight left in the boy, this one dragged like a strip of tape from the carpet. If Zeb had struggled harder it would have all stopped then and there. But he hadn’t. So it was all right again for a moment. All right. Okay. But only for a moment. He would take this one and use him as he had used the others. Just until he could catch his breath and find someone else.

  But the police had bolted in.

  And he had only the small derringer pistol to fend them off. One bullet had been fired at the shop so there was only a single shell left. To remove Zeb and the two raving paranoids at the doorway he would need at least one more.

  One bullet had meant only one alternative.

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  Pulling them down, he had discovered, was easier if he held them with a firm grip around the neck. If his body enveloped the other’s, like a cradle holding a baby perhaps, the pull felt easier, more controllable. The Thief didn’t know if it had something do with the neck’s connection both to the brain and the heart. He didn’t know if there was a soul crawling in the cords that ran between both, whatever a soul is. But from day one—night one actually—he found it worked better to grasp the throat, to cloak the other like that, so he did it that way and never strayed. He was meticulous in that detail.

  In his most recent life—the one he had ended earlier the morning of the gunfire—there were two sons, Justin and Hayward, seven and five. Both had glorious and angelic blonde hair, the gold of woven straw. He liked to round his palm on the backs of their golden heads, hide his after-dinner toothpick in his cheek, and kiss them both on their foreheads, his whiskers tickling them, before their mother finally put them to bed. Sitting back in the leatherette recliner in the living room, he would contemplate what dreams the night might hold for them. His job at the plant had paid for their pajamas and their frozen peas at supper. It didn’t afford much more. But pjs and peas were enough, he decided—nearly three and half years before when he had stepped into their lives.

  Names were about as empty as the vessels they stood for.

  But in this life, he had been called Willem Nash, Will by his work buddies, by his wife too. She would deliver him a bottle of Boh’s while he stood on the deck in summer and watched the kids roll on grass and play on a swing set with blue and white poles, one that he had put together out of the box for them the year before.

  And at night, he would make love to the wife and his head would flourish inside languid memories of another woman from a long time before.

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  Dreams plagued his sleep from the start. For a long time, they went away. But then they returned.

  After the accident, and his homecoming from the hospital, the wife had said
he seemed different. He told her to let it go.

  I’m better, aren’t I? he asked.

  Yes.

  Well then leave it. And we’ll be happy again. Together.

  The dreams had driven him, at least in part, to an argument with her. And the argument, at least in part, had driven him to hit her. She took Justin and Hayward to her mom’s in Thornhill and he was left alone. The sight of his seventy-seven Thunderbird sinking in rushing waters, only its front bumper still visible on the surface and looking shinier than it ever had on the road, was trapped in his mind like a bird in a cage. He couldn’t force it out so he picked up his keys and headed out for a drink.

  He had been drinking more in the weeks leading to his eventual explosion at her. But it wasn’t a dependence on the liquor to drown out his everyday life that kept him tipping them back. He had seen countless souls drown in that misery. He had witnessed that kind of self destruction first-hand and he assured the wife—and himself—that this was different. He knew the bottle was never a fix, but when sleep came after a few drinks the dreams stayed away. The T-bird’s chrome didn’t shine when he closed his eyes.

  So he sat at the bar of a pub called Pilate’s Purple Pill. The bar keep told him he didn’t look so good, but gave him his second high-ball after four Boh’s anyway. He started to agree with the judgment. He mustn’t look good because he assuredly did not feel good. His head hurt and he was shaking. There were noises in his mind, like a static. And he was squinting to read labels and make out faces. There was a shaky blur across the world that made going home to bed the best decision. He stood, went to settle up, and fished his wallet and keys from a pocket while heading for the register at the end of the bar.