Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  He finally smiled, more out of concession than out of actual desire to do it. But it appeased her. They read a little and went to sleep. Or, she did. He lay with his eyes open and an arm propping his head up so that a shaft of that light from across the street fell across his face. Outside the wind howled, that light bounced and jigged and waved. And a branch, maybe the same branch, tick-tick-ticked on the shingles over his head.

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  Time carried on like a runaway rollercoaster on an endless track. He started to think the worst thought: Can we ever really know someone? I mean, really know them. Completely?

  No one, he decided, knew him. Not the core essence of who he was. Even Caeli could never get that deep into him. And she never tried. Probably because she knew he didn’t want her to. Even his condition was secret to her. Well, not so much a secret as just a detail that had been left out. How could he have left out such a big part of him? Was it just because the colors had begun to fade and there would be no point telling her about something that seemed to no longer exist? He thought so, but he also thought it was more than that.

  The colors were going, yes, but what difference would it have made to her anyhow?

  He thought about Jackson. He thought about the Portuguese kid and the time between now and then. He thought about a tin can rolling along a shallow incline of pebbles and sand. And he thought about the realization lolling beneath its aluminum no-named pretense. He even thought about a handful of photographs he had from years before, ones of his mom and his unseen dad when they had been happy. Just as he couldn’t see his dad in those shots, he couldn’t picture himself in them either. He remembered that image of a gray tunnel where his head had been held down—as if it, too, was a burn on his arm that could not be erased. In a degree unfit to even consider, just as in that lightless tunnel, his head still felt heavy—even now. Even after being different had nearly been factored out. At least in the way it used to mean, in the Synaesthesia way.

  The next few months became a vacuum. He slipped out of them. Colors and sounds, pale and removed already at that point, left him entirely. Every remnant of his Synaesthesia had moved out, had silently slid out the back door and into the night where it had hurled its key into a dusty vacant lot.

  He wondered if it would ever come back.

  Looking down from a dizzying height, he felt the swarm of sleepiness in his brain. He stared ahead and saw gray, only gray. There was no velvet green or Thalo blue. Those were Caeli. And Caeli already felt long gone from his reach, like an after image from a wakeful dream. But really, though, she had stood still. He was the one who had gone missing.

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  The last night they ever read together, though neither of them planned it that way, she presented “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes. And he read her parts of the “Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde. But he didn’t do it in a booming voice or with a deep intonation like he might have before. There was meaning in the words, but he found himself saving that, stealing it away for himself. It was some small wisp, something he alone could hang on to. He looked past her now, seeing the color in her eyes, but feeling like it was out of reach. And he nearly wanted it that way. It felt easier.

  It was the first occasion in a long while when they had both read to each other on the same night. Several nights before, perhaps a hundred, perhaps two, she laughed about the absurdity, the paradox that was the Sebastion Redfield she knew.

  “I don’t know any Commerce students who read poetry. I don’t know any Commerce students who even like poetry. They all like money and golfing.”

  She laughed and he joined in. It was true. “Unless there’s a buck a draft night at the pubs,” he said, “We don’t come out too often. Not much for social occasions unless there’s networking to be done.” He winked at her. “Not much for rhyming couplets either.”

  But now, there was no laughter from either of them. Jackie-O had left the first day of August, a Saturday, had packed his car and driven off with just a flaccid hug and an expressionless face—and all the words unspoken. And the space between Caeli and Sebastion had grown to an interminable gap. Time fixed nothing and there was no effort left in him for anything. And that seemed to carry over into the little world they had created together. Ahead, he saw the blurry gray of a tunnel where his head was being held down. And in her, he saw beauty and wonder. He held everything in her. She felt like the opposite of every place he was headed, yet was powerless to stay his course and continue in her direction.

  Months passed while it died. Silence grew like a weed. And then the tears came. Huge welled-up rending sobs of anger, frustration, anguish and even betrayal.

  She wanted it to not be true, to have him hold her again and read from a book to her. He wouldn’t. She wanted to get on the subway with him again and ride around carefree for a whole afternoon, maybe head down to Kensington and look in the shops, all the while sipping expensive coffees. But he wouldn’t. She felt confused and she asked him if he was confused, if that’s what this was all about. He wanted to say that the word confused was a stifling, funny thing. It reminded him of when he was six and his mother looked at his Lite Brite project. All the orange pegs had been replaced with blue ones until the blue ones had run out. Then there had just been empty spaces, no holes, just little white Os on the stiff black paper. Did you get confused, Zeb?

  No, mommy, I meant it this way.

  Then he thought none of that would make sense to Caeli so he let it go. He thought to tell her about God, that God wasn’t in him. That he had a soul but his soul wasn’t God. That she had a soul and hers was God. And—

  But he didn’t tell her any of that either. He didn’t say why this was all happening. He didn’t rightly know. Green-eyed Caeli was the white dove somehow fit unharmed into a tiny prop box on stage; she was the pinnacle of a magic trick, released into the rafters of a darkened theatre, all wings and wonder, beside an eruption of cheers and applause. Only, at the crucial moment, the height of the stunt, Sebastion couldn’t summon the magic powers to even open the box. The trick didn’t work any more.

  “Worlds are made of hello and goodbye, aren’t they?” she asked him. “Aren’t they?” But finally admitting that this was it, she rescinded, and her tears stopped. She looked at him with her big dark green eyes, vaguely like she had that first day on the bus, as it jittered and groaned.

  “Sebastion,” she said, “What you need, I hope it finds you.”

  As Sebastion descended from the attic apartment and heard the squeak in the staircase’s middle step for the last time, he thought he could see Old Mrs. Morgan looking out at him through a pane in the kitchen window. In a flash, she was gone, if she had ever been there in the window at all. But, he supposed, real or imagined, it was her turn to smile.

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  Friends and lovers speak in tongues. They use a language that no one else knows, one that they have invented for themselves only. It’s a secret handshake that either lives forever...or dies, carried off when one of its creators leaves for good.

  Jackson took his and Zeb’s to New York City.

  And Sebastion climbed down a set of metal stairs, walked atop a patch of velvet grass and past a dwindling garden of dark weeds and overgrowth, with his and Caeli’s.

  Everyone walks their final goodbye march with nothing left to say. Somewhere there was a white mitten with one last unread note stuffed inside it—most likely a snippet of Cummings. Finally laundered, fluffy and expectant, the mitten waited to be found. But neither Caeli nor Sebastion would ever remember where it went. Or how it got there.

  How now, brown cow?

  III. Counterfeit Life

  Atrophy of the body, atrophy of the mind. Malin arrived on Thursday to find Zeb fallen out of his bed, his pastel green sheets twisted around his waist and trailing from his legs back up to the mattress. He lay on the cold white tile of the floor in his open-backed gown, propped up at his arms on the wooden guest chair which sat in the middle of the room. He w
as looking up at the door when she came in. His face was red and wet with tear-streaks down his cheeks. He was wailing, crying and sputtering, seemingly oblivious to her presence at the doorway.

  She didn’t know this was coming, not this exactly. But she had recognized that a realization, an epiphany of some magnitude, was imminent. Yesterday, after she had come in and seen the light smile on his face, after she had heard the song he was singing, she understood, subtly, that an overwhelming ordeal was coming.

  Part of her was glad it was ending, or at least beginning, but she still felt its crushing weight more acutely than she thought she should. She was surprised at her self. Seeing him there, like this, made her want to get right down there on the floor and bawl with him. Here was this man, young and on his way back to full health, a man with so much to live for, yanked from his bed to his hospital room floor by tears. By tears.

  His brain had pushed out some details. Some big ones. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It came in all shapes and sizes and she had seen it before, despite her relatively young age and inexperience. The human body is easily manipulated, easily tricked and fooled into thinking everything is just fine, Clementine. Even the body itself can cover its own pain signals, to ignore hurt and stress. The body can do what it wants, she knew, and would do so in a snap if that made things easier. Healing was crucial, and part of healing was forgetting. How could he sing songs forever? How could he even sing a song once? Her self-inflicted removal from the situation was gone. In her midriff, a stone fell to the bottom of her stomach, threatening to punch through its lining. She felt pity. As little as she wanted to, she felt pity for Sebastion Redfield and she wanted to help him.

  She went to him, crouched, and put her warm hands around his shoulders, squeezing them until he realized she was there. The morning light was dimly streaming through a gap in the curtains at the window and it fell across both of them.

  Still caught in his bawling, he finally looked up at her, his eyes red and swollen. His voice was cracked and hoarse, stifled by intermittent sobs and his wracked, aching lungs.

  “They’re not coming, are they? No one’s coming.”

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  The days and nights of Jewels Fairweather were empty, devoid of any loved ones and any real connection to the world. He had two goldfish—one a Broadtail Moor of considerable size, the other a smaller sparsely decorated Calico Veil Tail. They swam in silence—all except for the sleight motorized whir of a filter and an oxygen blower—in a plexi-glass tank by the living room window of his apartment. Solomon and Jude, they were called.

  Alongside scarcely anything else, there was also a large screen television facing a black leather chair. Most evenings, if his shift ended before supper time, he would eat a meal alone at the counter or standing at the stove, or even over the sink. It would generally be grilled fish or broiled chicken with vegetables spooned out of the pot they had been cooked in, a baked potato, and juice or milk chugged from the carton then put back in the refrigerator. He would rinse his dishes and then go to the living room to watch a movie. He had several stacks of DVD movies and another stack of older VHS videocassettes, among them director’s cuts of his favorite films from the last fifteen years.

  There were no lovers in his life, no friends except co-workers, no childhood chums that he had managed to hang on to. Despite his impressive physique and his good looks, despite his ability to carry a conversation well and speak about things that mattered, his world was primarily his own, not shared with anyone.

  His last sexual encounter, not including moments on the floor of his bathroom by himself, tears streaming his cheeks, had been with a dark-haired woman, about thirty, thirty-five, who called herself, simply, Dalyce. She had been reluctant to give out her full name because, she said, “I do these dating service things a lot, and I don’t want a buncha strange men all being able to find out where I live. It’s Dalyce. Just Dalyce.”

  In his mind, or minds, The Thief could see everything he wanted, everything he needed to, but the top details, the most recent ones, or the most pervasive, were easier to grab. Anything further down was more difficult to immediately access unless it wanted to be found. Going down there required a lot of vigor.

  The fact that Jewels’ only real friend was his partner, Marlon Smithee, made everything a whole lot easier. That was because Smithee was dead. And even Smithee didn’t know much; the two of them only hung out a handful of times. They would go for a drink after a shift, though Fairweather never had anything stronger than a Coke with ice. Jewels’ supervisor, his other co-workers, nobody, knew anything more than the bare essentials. He was a living phantom. He went home after work and stayed there until it was time to ‘feed the machine’ or hit the gym or go back to work.

  And he worked out a great deal, even had some equipment in the second bedroom of his apartment that he used when he didn’t feel like going out into the world. When the Thief looked into a long mirror in that room he saw an impressive man looking back at him. The only thing he needed, as he saw it, was some color in his skin. That and the desire to approach people, and he would have any woman he wanted—if that’s what he wanted.

  The apartment was meticulously neat; Thief had expected this orderliness when he first flashed through the mind of the man he had now become. But at the moment, only days after his release from North York General Hospital, the living room was a mess of boxes, empty cans, wrappers and dirty dishes. It stank of mingled foods and sauces, coffee and even tobacco. There were empty beer bottles lying on the carpet in stains that likely would never come out and the Thief sat silently in the mess, slouched in the leather chair with the blinds closed.

  That was the issue with all of this: when he took someone down there to his icy precipice it wasn’t just his memories that would become property of the Thief. Their emotions would be his too.

  And right now, he found himself in a constant vise of sadness, squeezing him tight. The anguish made him feel like this Katie was his, like she had died that morning. Not eleven years earlier. He, like the true Jewels Fairweather had done, was mourning for the loss of a girl called Katie Becks.

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  More than an issue, it was a real bitch of the situation. This wasn’t like Willem Nash’s diabetes—shots of insulin and a wife that watched his diet for him would compensate for that kind of crack in the vessel. But the interiors, the thoughts, those were not as easily managed. With every one he took, he consumed every part of them, every morsel, every contemplation, every vice, every desire, every feeling and every inadequacy. He could quell the little ones and push them away, but dire ones, large ones that were all-encompassing—he could do nothing with those. He needed for them to either pass, or he needed to learn a way around them.

  Pieces of this life and that life, one from years ago, and one from today, all vied for a place at the front of the line. Each had a resounding timbre and they fed off of one other, a sick family of symbiotes or a support group for the eternally disfunctional. The Thief found that when one set of memories came fizzing to the surface, bits of others would inevitably come on its tailwind, looking for their slice of the attention. He wished he could ignore the lot of them but that was impossible and the never-ending onslaught exhausted his mind. He needed to just rest. He needed to eat—this body was a big one, used to working out five times a week and then succumbing to a voracious appetite—and he needed to figure out his feelings for this girl. Pictures of her bleeding to death on the sidewalk were everywhere. They were imagined, but real enough for him. They were stuck with magnets on the refrigerator or swimming on the reflection in his television’s blank picture tube. And they were carried on the leaves of fake plastic plants as bubbles of air pushed them about inside the fish tank where Jude and Solomon endlessly roamed.

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  He had two cracked ribs and his right arm was broken. It was in a cast and around his chest, a tightly-wrapped gauze constricted his breathing, not allowing him to inhale or exhale too deeply, lest a
stiletto of pain would seize him up and down. His face was a mess of still-forming scab and there were swollen bumps under his scalp. On his right leg, in addition to bruises and scrapes, there was a set of metal brace plates in a consortium to hold his leg straight at the knee. Its small pins had no give and pushed uncomfortably against the cartilage of his knee cap so he couldn’t even bend the damn thing.

  After being revived then spilling in and out of a Katie-filled unconsciousness for a half day or more, he had spent four subsequent days in hospital with no visitors except his immediate supervisor and two strangers. Supes brought a card signed by everyone at the EMS Station where he worked and a staffer from the York Region’s Emergency Medical Service arrived some time later—it was standard procedure, she told him, to send in an official after an on-the-job accident such as his. His last visitor, after Supes and the staffer, was a psychologist—one from Houston whom he was certain he remembered from before. But through his pain and these new and overpowering visions of Katie, he didn’t give the Houston shrink much thought at all.

  Four times, the light of morning drew close and then retreated to allow the darkness of night to take its place. And on a fifth day, when the sun was at its crest in the winter sky, and with the blessings of his doctor, he checked himself out of the hospital with nothing in hand but a stack of prescription slips and some metal tubes of ointment. He had been cautioned, had been given instructions about when to change his dressings, what positions to sleep in so as to better heal his ribs, and when to return to have his cast removed. His supervisor had assured him that his pay would be intact and he signed Conrad Julius Fairweather’s name on some documents to ensure he would get the appropriate injury compensation while he was off duty for recuperation. Physiotherapy was scheduled to begin in another week.