But she did her best to dismiss such preconceptions, deciding that, more often than not, they prove false anyway. And this time was no exception. Here was a man, just a couple of years younger than herself, filled with all the same angst, emotion and despair that had been plaguing her. She felt an outlandish, if minor affinity...and then she found it: proof, in a roundabout way, that what she was hunting for was not here. She was relieved. For she was actually beginning to like this one a little.
She still questioned her certainty; she had made up her mind in the past and had been wrong. She needed to be sure this time so she rode along with him, next to his skewed details, out of order and at times, entirely incomprehensible behind his own tendency to exaggerate. She didn’t listen to this man, bruised and purple about the neck, his blood-smeared eyes and strained face finally relaxed, with the usual arm’s length. She sat and heard, interjecting hardly at all, ignoring her training to steer the essence of the conversation, and even laughing at his poor attempts of wit. And she did so not as commentator, not as solution provider, and not as judge of value. She did so as a friend.
But there was an under-the-radar spray of thought, pulsing beneath her words—what scant few she actually said over the duration of his talks. It was his low state—the one he spiraled into after Caeli, and after Jackson, but before Oliver—that held the most promise for her, the most answers to her questions. She could sense it coming, looming, and wanted it a little closer than he let it be. It was the thing he kept at bay, the set of circumstances which he circled but never walked out into. Certainly, she knew the clinical details of it—she was determined and not the least wily sort when it came to her research. Nevertheless, she found herself drawn to his inevitable personal explanation of it, outside of the written details in some manilla file-folder.
This was the only moment when she lost it; the only moment when friendship was booted unceremoniously from the room. The only moment when cynicism ruled hers and Sebastion’s brief meeting of the Fates. The only moment when she steered.
“Where’s your dad?”
“I don’t know.” He looked at her pointedly and she did the same to him.
“You killed him. Didn’t you?”
<> <> <>
Sex gave Jewels Fairweather a headache. In recent years, the anomaly had become particularly prominent, enough to make him worry. Enough to make him try and extinguish it. But the problem remained, making the back of his skull, all the way down to the slope of his lower neck, throb with a dullness he couldn’t squint away.
The Thief found this information not far below Jewels’ still-present thoughts of Katie. There was an icy stalactite down there, carved from a deep, pressing need to ignore intimacy. And the need was now so strong and forced that the aversion had actually created a physical ache, so painful that it was a dissuading factor to ever make love again. But a rock-solid argument from his not-so-silent partner had led Jewels to try and coax himself past the headaches. Trial by tribulation, Jewels might have called it. No gain without pain.
As soon as he found Dalyce’s number posted on a small card by the hallway telephone, the Thief dialed it and she arrived a little less than an hour later, smelling strongly, and peeling things off as the door drew shut behind her. When she was naked, he dropped his pants to the carpet, bent her over the fish tank and slapped the insides of her thighs a little until her legs parted. The aquarium’s small whirring motor sent a noisy stream of bubbles in a line, bursting on the surface of the water.
When he came, the dullness protracted outwards from that point on the back of his head and he found it nearly as obtrusive as the buzzing he had experienced in Zeb’s living room or standing at the counter in the Pit Stop Confectionary.
Dalyce had little to say, and he remembered only sparse, shadowy words from her lips, among the sprawling head pain. Something about a condom, something about the cast on his arm, something about the mess of his place, something about the smell. But she pulled her clothes on again in the near-dark, and—with some money—left.
When she was gone and there was silence again—all except for that bubbling motor oxygenating the fetid tank water—he sat back in the leather chair at the center of the room. Solomon and Jude bobbed, like every other day, with their large round eyes in an endless expression of horror—as always, navigating this way and that in no discernable pattern.
Tomorrow. In the piled up thoughts that ran beneath his pain he thought, tomorrow.
Tomorrow he would go back and find Zeb.
<> <> <>
The days were gray; the nights black.
Summer, and into fall, the year following convocation, he fell helpless. Sebastion was the wakeful dead, marching to a drum he could no longer hear. Or didn’t want to. He got on the subway, went to it, then came back. All the while, numbers in his eyes, and coffee in his veins. Eventually, he managed to drag himself up from bed in the morning early enough to catch a ride with his father—who always had his shirt pressed and tie tied succinctly.
By his third year at the firm, both he and Fish had moved up from junior analyst to senior analyst. Not a junior partner, not by a long shot, but a far sight above the lowest of the low on the rung of importance. The two even shared an office—another absurdity. But absurdity had become vague and paltry by then, a pale imitation of itself, like most everything else. Absurdity was like a stop sign that every driver, used to it being there on the corner, ignores without even a flicker of thought.
Through it all, like a pillar in a storm, Riley Fischer was a strange kind of miracle. His haphazard attendance, his insistence that his job was not really important, and his indignant refusal to iron his shirt, made him laughably influential. More absurdities: how could anyone like that offer up value?
But he did. Sebastion couldn’t help but keep treading water because Fish was out there in the deep with him. Stunt after stunt, strange rant about quality of life after strange rant, at the very least, Riley kept the work days entertaining. And Sebastion nearly went in each morning only to see what Fish would do or say next.
That autumn the real fear set in. It would come again and again, but like anything, panic can become artificial. It can become tepid and comfortable. Fear can be gotten used to. Be damned if we can’t get used to any ol’ thing.
But Sebastion’s fear nearly choked him then, when it was fresh and new. He was downright scared that he might never again see a purple dash on a warm breeze or that sprinkle of blue when he lay in a tub of hot water. What if he could never again feel a cool, supple leaf on the back of his neck when a bird’s call echoed through the trees in his back yard? It was his worry that all the color and drama he had grown accustomed to—his Gift from God—was completely vanquished. He went to see Caeli at her attic apartment, but she was gone. Mrs. Morgan, surprised at his appearance, told him she was in Madagascar, on a humanitarian mission to help poverty-stricken citizens of that island nation. She had left a month earlier.
It was then that he took to the woods, north east of Edan Township, to contemplate the fact that she was really gone, to contemplate the more urgent departure of his Gift, and to try to restitute himself for It.
There was relief when he found those colors again. Their trusty presence and reassuring company—though in a somewhat bastardized, phony mockery of their former selves—was enough. Somehow, just enough.
Armed with that, and with Fish’s absurdity-cum-rationality, he managed to look his father in they eye over dinner, make it on time in the mornings, and settle in for another few months of gray days. Maybe even years.
<> <> <>
“Oh God, Red, make no mistake. I know full well that I was raised with the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth.”
Fish stood at the side of Sebastion’s desk, between it and his own. He was bouncing a plush ball—small, faux soccer, about the size of a grapefruit—against the glass window that ran floor to ceiling in their office. With each bounce, the ever-so-slightly tinted glass which displayed
snippets of city punctuated by other similar buildings, bulking like a set of thick, uneven stilettos, wavered in a set of cascading ringlets. The half-opaque reflections of overhead fluorescents, sickly yellow and insipid, faltered too—like they were being bullied.
It was the day that dad fell, but hours before. Early January, early afternoon, when the sky was darker than it should have been, made even darker by that tint. Fish and Sebastion had been discussing the importance, or the lack thereof, of what they did each day—every day. Sebastion had told Fish that he didn’t understand what real work was, that he only mocked it because he could afford to. Because his father would bail him out at any moment. Fish was not so much offended by Sebastion’s remarks as he was delighted by them. Finally, Fish must have thought, Red decides to really pipe up.
“So, if you’re such a brat, then why’re you here—working for your bread?” Sebastion asked him with his tongue planted a little inside his cheek.
“Simple.” Fish bounced the ball against the window pane again. “My dad got tired of buying me everything.” He moved over to Sebastion’s desk, planted his keester on it and jumped up, letting his feet dangle. “Red. You’re looking at this all wrong. You’re looking at this like it’s a job. I mean, it is. But you’re placing emphasis on that—”
Right, thought Sebastion, easy for someone to say when they got the job by way of a nasty blackmailing.
“—Look at what we do. Old ladies with their husbands’ millions come in here and stroke us a check—” This was not his infamous Fish-as-politician routine but it was close. “—We feed a few numbers through the system, based on some financial model someone came up with God knows when, and the old lady’s balance comes back a little higher—all the while her kids are on a yacht, cruising, I don’t know, the South of France or something. Wealth management, no, wealth accumulation.
“We are the Money Mongers, Red. Make no mistake. We make money from nothing. We make money from money.
“That’s not important. That’s not life-altering. Well, it bloody-well is. But should it be?”
To Sebastion, Fish sounded suddenly like Jackie-O, shadow strings and unsaid conspiracy. He sounded like he actually had something rolling around in his brain other than vast knowledge regarding the closures on every type of women’s bra and how to mix a proper drink (not too bitter, not too sweet) but never would Sebastion say that Fish was his friend. Not in a million years.
“So,” Fish continued, “You’ve really got to ask yourself, then, what does it matter? Who cares if I show up after a few drinks? I’m expendable. Anyone can plug numbers into the—trumpets please—Wealth Accumulation Model. Right?
“Sure. So I’m not going to worry about it. I’m not going to lose sleep over this place. Merridew doesn’t own the sky. Or me. I’m going to go out with beautiful ladies, and sleep until noon on Fridays when I know Merridew isn’t coming in. You don’t think he screws off to play a round of golf because he thinks it helps the company, do you?
“No. Merridew is not God. I refuse to let this place, or him, become my life.”
To Sebastion, those sounded nearly like famous last words from one of two infamous men: either one who was about to quit or one who was about to get his ass fired.
<> <> <>
Oliver Redfield was sixty-one the first time he fell from a blackout. At least, the first time the blackout was not the result of liquor.
Like his dad before him, he had a weakness for drink. And, also like his dad, Big Teddy Redfield, he had taken a trophy girl for his wife. Sadie had been a stunning undergrad; her major had been ethics in secondary education. They met at a fundraiser when she was twenty and he was thirty-five, just starting to lose the hair on his crown.
Sadie, though, had been a feisty one, not like Rita, her complacent mother-in-law. Rita had been quiet, demure and never prone to raising her voice in protest—not even at the last. She had gone to her grave with her husband, wrapped and disfigured just as he was, within the same cab of the same BMW coupe.
She had died by his side.
At the ten-minutes-past-five rush to get out of the building Oliver had taken his spill. With the world falling away like the negative posterity of an exploding flash bulb, he saw the marble floor in the lobby, and pairs of dress shoes and conservative pumps, coming towards him. The last image, blurry in oranges and reds was not of the lobby floor, however—it was, instead, of his wife. Beautiful and elegant, full of grace. And not, in that second, at all feisty. Just there. His wonderful Sadie-babe.
Outside the polished doors of the elevator, pressed by ties and skirts all around, he crashed against a stainless steel ashtray and scattered the dust of dead cigarettes across his face and hands, and all down his suit coat. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, he thought, as the color ran away, as the blood dropped out of his head like thick syrop.
When hee came conscious his face was strapped under an oxygen mask. He was sitting on a stretcher in his lobby among a small crowd of watchers, looking up at Sebastion, while someone was blathering on and on about Sadie.
“I saw your mother. I saw your mother,” the voice was saying over and over. He was looking around to see who was talking, but then realized his son was trying to calm him down. That made him grasp that the voice he was hearing was his own, and he promptly turned silent.
After similar blackouts he fell nine more times over the next five weeks. And each time, he was lucky enough to have his fall caught by something—or someone—so the worst it generally got was a bloody forehead and a few bruises on his cheeks. Once, though, the seventh fall, he came to with a stinging gash across his neck. He had fallen against and down on the sharp edge of the refrigerator door handle in the coffee room at the end of the hall from his office.
With that one, there had been oozing blood and it smelled of copper in his nostrils. He finally brought himself to make an appointment to see the doctor.
Oliver had his own trip down the long gray tunnel, his own ordeal with the buzzing and clicking, the cool metal tray and the fuzzy white mitten on his forehead. A second and third opinion, a CT scan of his brain, and an MRI all confirmed the same thing: grade IV astrocytoma. An end-stage tumor that was eating away at the rest of his time. A cool and collected thief crawling around inside his head and taking what he wanted. This diagnosis suggested a short life of endless suffering, of daily injections, and of painful treatments. And, in the end, his normal life would be over.
In late March, when there was still marginal snow in the gutters and on lawns, and after it became clear that the drugs his father was administered could only lessen the seizures and not contain the advancement of his condition, Sebastion took Oliver to Outlook Bay Regional Cancer Center. He was checked in and he would stay there, getting scheduled biopsies and spinal fluid drainings, a regular diet of needles, and, eventually, a full-out and evasive stereotactic craniotomy—the removal of a section of scalp and the withdrawal of a large piece of the tumor.
By June, it was decided that the craniotomy had done little for the short term, and nothing for the long term. An extreme portion of the malignant mass was still alive and continuing to grow, stretching like a spider from his occipital lobe to his temporal and possibly beyond that. Oliver Redfield was dying. And he refused traditional radiation treatment, chemotherapy and the installation of a brain shunt, without discussion. By that point and, as a result of his lack of further treatment, he was fighting headaches, clouded thoughts, greater blackouts and hysteric episodes that could last for hours. Sebastion was working only a handful of hours at the firm each week. Most of his time was spent at the center, bedside, battling tears and rages, and calling for nurses. The cocktail injection of Lamictal, Topiramate and Trileptal, to lessen the severity and frequency of the blackouts, was all that Oliver would allow, and even its potency seemed to diminish over time.
On June twenty-second, a Sunday, at the insistence of his father, Sebastion took Oliver home. Dad, as did his son, hated the hospital-smell. And he did
n’t want to die in the clinic. The boy carried his father out of that hospital as doctors and nurses, yelling and fussing, faded away into the hallway-background. Their dire odors, their serious white coats and their authority were ignored.
<> <> <>
Sebastion had never bought a dress-shirt in his life. Not ever. For work, he only borrowed a set of the five most brightly colored shirts from his father’s closet, ones that Oliver admitted to never wearing. And then, sometime after Jackson left for NYU and he started full-time, he purchased about a dozen or so silk ties of the finest weave. He would intermingle the ties with each of the colorful shirts over the course of two weeks, trying not to wear the same shirt or the same tie two days in a row. In his life, there were two of his father’s statements which he could remember without falter: An artist always signs his work and a fine tie makes the suit, makes the man.
In a bizarre manner, remembering such things didn’t create outright despair for Sebastion. There was a registered sadness, yes, but the news of his father’s illness and all the impending tasks it created for him—horrible and contemptible for a son to have to do—built a grim removal. He approached it by replacing it. In his mind and somewhere down below, the gray dispirit for his job that he had learned to accept with submission was now the same wooden handle he pinned on this. There was empty attention for his dying dad. There were moments, little ones, but powerful and straining, when that was not the case. But, for the most part, he found such barrenness made it easier to hang on to. He skipped grief and went straight to acceptance.
They hired a nurse—Cordova, who turned out to be excellent—when Oliver, on one of his good days, insisted that Sebastion head back to work four days out of five. Sebastion, who remembered well watching Oliver loop his tie before jetting off in the Beemer to work in the mornings, now stood—perhaps as a peace offering—by the mirror in Oliver’s room to tie his each morning. This was usually just as his dad was waking up and, often, while he was still coherent for a portion of the day. A fine tie makes the suit. Makes the man.
Thalo Blue Page 24
