Merridew told him about Daniela and Oliver in a few short, terse details. He said that Sebastion’s dad and the girl had a tryst—that’s what he called it, a tryst—once, before the weekend at the summer house. Daniela, he said, had come to Merridew with bruises and marks after and she had pointed out Oliver as the one who did it. After saying that much, Merridew told Sebastion to get the hell out of his building or he would call security and have the boy removed and embarrassed, just as he had threatened to do to Oliver some time before.
As he left the offices of Wittman & Merridew and descended to street level there was ringing in his ears. But the ringing turned to voices. His father’s voice. Put your arm this way, Sadie-babe. Look back at the camera, Daniela. That’s it, Sadie-babe. Over your shoulder, yeah, just like that, Daniela. You look so beautiful, Daniela.
Daniela, Daniela, Daniela.
The subway ride home was a blur that Sebastion would never be able to recollect completely. It was a bit like finding yourself at someone’s house after you’ve swallowed a few little white pills, had a few drags off a mellow-stick and pounded back a few drinks for good measure. The details of how you got there are all lost to the wind and you’re left with nothing but a big dull hole. We do it to ourselves, he barely remembered thinking. We make the hangover a choice when our elbow is the swivel to our lips. We do it to ourselves. And then we call it suffering.
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Sorrow comes in waves like song. High then low, then nothing at all. Then something again. Music fills portions, then cascades away to silence or near silence. The song rises and falls; It comes and it goes. Sometimes it doesn’t go.
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He felt like he was sleeping. His eyes were coated in a fog that he couldn’t quite see through and that he couldn’t quite blink away. He remembered those little white pills of Viv’s, the gutted and stiff drags from the magic sticks Jackie-O used to get for them. Was that real life? Or was this? The memories felt alive and full and against the weak palour of now, so he let thier nearly horrendous outcomes slip slinkily out the back door of his mind. They were fresh and good to him and everything recent wore the color bleak.
The last time he could place such a feeling of dreamy unconsciousness was far back in his mind. Then, there was an unshakeable mental image of Caeli, looking tanned and impeccable, clutching his arm like a life-preserver. The two of them moved through heads and shoulders that bobbed like buoys on water. They were at a black-tie business function and, nearby, hovering like lithe little speedboats with cut engines, his boss and his father chatted inanely with some of the bouys as they nodded and sloshed. Seeing her there with them, in that ordered mess, had made him sick to his stomach.
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Though he walked upright in his constant battle fuge, though he operated like a man living some thick and gauzy wide-awake dream, he could not sleep at night. He tried to. Laid his head down and closed his eyes. But he couldn’t. He tried to eat. Couldn’t do that either. He would close his eyes and he would hear that song, Helpless, and he would try and shut out the drawl of the harmonica, all melancholic and far away.
He fed his dad, bathed him, all the while thinking how this man, this decrepit, disgusting less-than-man man had screwed around on mom. She was so beautiful. He wanted to scream at him, What, she wasn’t young enough for you? You had to go for an even younger model? Was there just one? Or did you have piles of them stacked up?
He saw his father, looked at his pink scars, his loose, wrinkled flesh on his scalp and pictured what the man’s brain might look like inside his skull: a spider-crawl mess, the creeping cancerous predator, like the marbled white of fat scattered through the healthy red meat of a roundsteak. He looked at that bile that kept coming up out of him, too, that puke that never seemed to end. In his sleepless haze, he wondered fanatical, ludicrous things that a rested mind might not have rambled across. Was that bile all of his father’s bad spilling out of him? Or was it all of his good? Was there any of that in him?
The nurse, Cordova, came and went.
He sat silent.
He didn’t say anything.
He cried sometimes.
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And then, one night, Oliverthecrow didn’t come.
He wasn’t there on the branch, not early in the evening, not later. Not in the middle of the night. There was horrible inadequate silence from downstairs, and Sebastion lay in his bed staring at the framed window where he used to see the crow and where sometimes he used to see a mirrored room of golds and browns and oranges, where Sicily was lifelessly flopped across a hotel bed.
It was hot that September. The heat held over from August and languished in the city. All the windows were open and small fluttering moths could be heard batting senselessly against the windscreens. Breezes flowed through the hollow house, but they offered no relief. They were suffocating and stiff; there was no coolness in them, no humidity. Sebastion didn’t get out of bed. He just lay there on his white sheet, his feet spread bottom corner to bottom corner, waiting for the bird. Black, little head jerking stiffly to look in several directions. Perching. Waiting. Then fluttering off without notice.
But he never came.
Three days passed without the crow coming to land on the oak branch. And, lying in a residue of sweat in the relentless heat, Sebastion finally thought he would go mad from that. How does insanity follow from something that doesn’t happen? He wanted to know but he denied himself the answer and simply gathered up his sheets with eyes half closed and nearly purple from fatigue. He moved out of that room, pulled his bed into his father’s across the hall and tried to sleep there.
It was in his father’s room where he finally found a long, deep sleep. But it was broken by wailing sobs and shrieks from the basement. He got up from bed, staggered, and through the warm darkness, made his way to the basement steps like so many times before. He reached for the light, and when he flicked it, the basement fixture let out a snap-clink. There was a burst of radiance above Oliver’s bald head and then it was gone. The bulb had burned out.
He reached for the kitchen light instead and it came on with a hum, illuminating a pale shaft that washed across the stairs and down to Oliver who was lying like a wooden plank in his bed. He couldn’t sit up anymore but was wailing as loud, if not louder than he had all those other times.
As he descended the stairs, while Oliver still howled in exasperated fear and pain, Sebastion saw that the bed sheets were soaked. Oliver had pissed himself again. The wet stain was a large, semi-round circle and the room stank of it. The wooden stairs weren’t cool like they should have been, like they always had been before. They were warm. Everything was and Sebastion’s sweat stood out on his forehead and under his arms, dampening the hair there. He was only wearing a pair of boxers. It was too hot for anything more. He only stood on the bottom step, nearly naked, blocking some of the light that fell on his father from the kitchen. In the harsh dividing light from upstairs, the old man’s scalp made him look like a burn victim or like he had lain his head under a spilled pot of boiling water, letting its harshness contort the tissue with a potent set of glowing-hot blade fingers.
Oliver went on and on. His moans and sobs and cries had become incomprehensible most of the time. Sometimes there were words mixed in, ones that Sebastion could even make out. Please. Blue. Crayon. There was a host of others. There was profanity, there was the name of his wife, there was his name, the long and short versions. He never heard him say Merridew though. Nor Daniela. He shifted his weight on the last stair, making it squeak and creak in a set of long, shallow groans. They were faint. But, almost as if Oliver could hear them under his own volume, his stifled sobs and wailing profanities came nearly to a dribbled stop. He sniffled, and opened his red eyes. He squinted, and looked towards the stairs where his son stood, shifting gently, swaying side to side on the step.
Daniela, dad. Do you remember her?
From Oliver only silence. And a hollow befuddled stare, nearly as
though he saw through his son and was staring up at the kitchen light fixture.
Daniela! he screamed. Daniela! Daniela!
Oliver cringed—his skin was pulled tight against his face and his upper body shook with those words, as though they were empty shell casings, all discharged and clinking around inside his skull. There’s no room for that, Sebastion thought at once. Your head’s so filled with poison now that there’s scarcely room for even a whisper of thought.
He went to his father’s bed, fell on the mattress, and grabbed the man’s collar. There were flecks of spittle, some dried and crusty tan, like custard maybe, on the chest of his pajama shirt. The pent-up anger and bitterness in Sebastion made him holler into Oliver’s face. Their noses were a finger width apart. Their eyes were mirrored balls reflecting each other.
Was she the first? Was she the only?
He broke down then; tears just like his dad’s had been waiting to burst out of him for weeks and months. They were weak, stinging tears. But Oliver said nothing. Only looked.
Why won’t you answer me, you SON OF A BITCH? Huh? You did that to my mother. Your WIFE! And you lay there. You lay there and say nothing... He fell away from the face-to-face gaze then. His shoulders stooped and his grip on Oliver’s collar relaxed a little. Almost as an afterthought, his words came out weak and helpless, like the last-breath plea of a drowning man about to finally go under. And you kept paying him. For years...you kept paying that bastard.
Oliver’s lips parted, and from between them more bile bubbled and drizzled into a fine tan liquid which ran down his chin and onto his son’s knuckles. It was thinner than before. It was paler and clearer than the tan it had been and it ran in two separate lines down to Sebastion’s wrists.
Coming on the last edge of that spill was a set of words, composed, but stuttered and empty. I-I did it for y-you.
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Blue was gentle whispers of reassurance. He had heard them in his ears as far back as he could remember, and he always believed they were the whispers of his mother. As he grew older, he started to wonder if they were the whispers of Caeli.
He tried to dismiss that though; she was gone.
Or, rather, he was gone from her.
Sadie took her son to church every Sunday morning until he was nine. Not a Roman Catholic church, to which Oliver belonged, but to her own Presbyterian one. Oliver always called the Presbyterian faith the weakest and most bastardized of all the common western religions. The one without any rules, he said. The one for fragile souls who just need something.
But the two of them went anyway, without Oliver who, near as Sebastion could remember, always stayed home and watched television in his bathrobe or sat in the basement listening to his records. It was the man’s one time in a week when he didn’t seem obsessed with looking at bills and crunching numbers.
At church, Sebastion remembered all the gray heads, strong perfumes, and varying shades of color on the old, wrinkled lips—and all the comments as he and Sadie were greeted at the big wooden doors. The voices from those old puckered lips adorned in reds and fuscias always asked about Oliver and always told Sebastion what a well-behaved big boy he must be to sit with his mom upstairs while all the other little boys in the congregation were downstairs in Sunday School. Sadie, though, wanted a more straightforward approach to her son’s senses; she knew he could handle it and comprehend it better than the other kids and wanted him upstairs, by her side, while the pastor read from the Good Book—not downstairs pasting together collages of Mary and Joseph or coloring in a newsprint picture of Jesus on the cross where his hands and feet bled down to the ground.
Sebastion was able to understand complexities quicker—that was true. Around the time when Sadie and he boarded planes for all those teaching hospitals and university centers to have the tests done, she worried—as Oliver did—that their son was slow. No, she was reassured, he just needed more time to process the world. His Gift from God was a blessing, but blessings take time to understand and accept. And, in a way, the reassurances had been right. By the age of nine, the evidence of his exceeding mind was everwhere.
The boy always liked word games. A few months after Sadie thought he had lost interest in learning the alphabet altogether, Sebastion, only four at the time, found a small novelty notepad on the oak desk of Oliver’s back study. He started reading the letters printed on its white pages in blue ink out loud and this was still months before he would start school. He learned to spell short words from a stack of middle-years word finds—those shoddy ones with two-color covers and coarse paper. Sadie had first thought about bringing them home when she heard him reciting letters from the blue and white notepad but hearing her son alone in his room after she had tucked him in had clenched it. C-A-W. Caw, he spelled, then said aloud with child-like pride. C, he would then add, C is gray, A is green, W is brown.
She never pushed such habits on him, only made room for them. Only found things to help. Sometimes she felt vulnerable and defeated by it all. How can I possibly give him what he needs? He has so much potential. And all I do is bring home a couple of Search-a-Word books... But, in the little ways, the important ways, she thought, she was doing the best she could.
And she was.
So she started taking him to church when he was seven and they went every Sunday for the next two years. But when the two of them sat in there, near the middle, he wouldn’t listen, like she thought he would. He heard. He just didn’t process. He sat in the pew with his little legs dangling and he stared upwards.
When they got inside the big wooden doors one Sunday morning a man in a long flowing gray robe crouched down to Sebastion and said, Well, hello there young man, welcome to the House of The Lord. He knew that God lived in heaven and heaven was in the sky. So when he got into church and sat still next to his mom like a good big boy, he looked up to see if he could find God.
But all he saw was the cracked spackle of the ceiling. It was a light color and the dark lines on it ran in long jagged stretches carving nearly perfect right angles before moving in another direction, then turning again. Mingled with that design there were two wooden-slat ceiling fans that went silently round and round at differing speeds relative to one another while the man in the gray robes talked and talked. One fan would do nearly two and a half revolutions by the time the other one turned once. And, eventually forgetting to look for God up there, forgetting, even, to listen to the man in the robe, he would race those two fans. To see when one would overtake the other.
Sadie and Oliver didn’t argue so much in those days. There was more silence between them than anything else. He would work in the study at the back of the house when he was not at the office downtown and she would make meals in the kitchen-dining split. But neither would say much. He didn’t treat her well. But Sebastion wouldn’t decide that much until later in his young life.
When there was arguing, the words they spat at each other caused cataclysms. The last time he heard them yelling was one night after church in late autumn. November maybe, maybe later. Sebastion lay on his bed and stared at his own ceiling wishing there was a fan up there to watch.
The house was dark. Nearly all the lights were off except one lamp in the living room. When he heard them, with their voices getting louder, he got up from his bed and crept down the hallway to the end where it branched in one of two directions: the kitchen-dining split or the living room. Beyond that were the guest bedroom and the second bathroom and then the door to the garage. He stood and watched them with his hand resting on the cool wall of the opening. His mother’s voice particularly made him feel something shiny, black and shapeless at the ends of his fingertips where he should have felt the semi-gloss coolness of the drywall paint. The yelling was loud; both of them, mom and dad each, were staring at each other, their stances at odds. She accused him of something and he told her to go then. She said that she was going to do just that. And she left. The front door banged. Neither one of them saw their only child standing at the mou
th of the hallway, confused and forgotten.
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Sadie made room for every one of Sebastion’s desires, whether they were wants or just notions. That’s why she bought him a whole set of paints for his eighth birthday after he had told her he just didn’t have enough colors to make the pictures he wanted.
There, she said, Now you can mix them up any way you want. And you can make a million different shades.
But some time after she left, he stopped using them. They dried up, in more ways that one.
In his mind, connected to the banging of the front door, was the memory of that set of paints and also the droning sounds of Oliver’s Yellow Brick Road record coming up the stairs. Oliver played it over and over after Sadie left. For hours he would just get to the last note and put the needle right back on the inside track. He started drinking more then too.
By the time Sebastion was thirteen he had helped his father off with a dress shirt and into bed at two or three in the morning more times than he could remember.
On one of those nights, as Oliver’s dress shoes fell to the carpet of his bedroom floor with a softened double-thump, he said with stinking breath of beer and weed, Red. They used to a call me Red at the firm. When I first started. Nobody calls me Red anymore. Sebastion didn’t say anything at that. He hated it when people called him Red.
The drunken blabber carried on; the intoxicated always have much to say. Boy, Sebastion-boy, d-did you know that one of the Group of Seven—the painters, you know who they are, don’t you?—he used to have a house here. Right here in Vaughan. M-hm. Just a few blocks away...but nobody can remember which one of the seven...
Thalo Blue Page 27
