Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  Coming for him without warning.

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  Two: THE TRUTH-TELLING;

  There is a Kingdom

  There is usually a turning point in a life—a moment when things become remarkably clear, or when they become remarkably unclear. Ever after, things become obviously different and such tangent-like behavior can nearly always be routed back to that one point. Luckily, and hopefully, there can be more than one turning point for us all.

  -Drawing Lines in the Sand:

  A Way of Life,

  DAVID R. G. LANGTREE

  I believe in a kind of accidental prayer. I believe in miracles. But I have never seen evidence of either.

  -THE BOOK OF THE DEAD,

  September 23

  “One day, Sebastion, you’ll hear a different song.” She was lying beside him, her eyes shiny and iridescent from the porch light across the way—the one that was always on. It was screening through wavering trees in the yard on the other side of the street, lightening and brightening her face, causing shadows to fall in solid, but downy-edged bars that moved across it. The night was windy and branches were scraping against the roof. “You’ll be standing at the gates and your mind will light up with something you’ve never considered, but something that was always there.”

  “You don’t think so now—,” she said with the barest hint of a smirk. He hadn’t said a word, but she could sense his skepticism. She could always sense his mood nearly like it had been her own. “—No, you don’t think that at all right now. Not as I’m saying this.

  “But you will.”

  Caeli had a way of articulating things so they didn’t become sales pitches. An outlandish statement from her lips didn’t come off sounding like a sermon on the mound either, which, to Sebastion, was even more essential. He had no trouble hanging up the phone on someone pushing magazine subscriptions. But if God had been the voice on his alarm clock one morning, though he couldn’t remember ever believing a God existed, he would still have difficulty hitting the snooze bar.

  She lay there on her side, next to him, with her head held in her hand and her elbow propped against the mattress. Behind her was a long rectangle of light on the slanted ceiling. She was naked from head to toe. One leg was bent at the knee and laying across his. There was a shine from the window on the rounding of her slim hip. To Sebastion, the curve of her breasts looked like a visual display of nature’s perfection.

  “On that day, as we all will, you’ll plummet into the abyss. Time will come to a crawl, everything that is not the essential you will fade away, and all you’ll hear is the voice of your God. In that everlasting moment, you’ll understand it all. Everything. Divinity.

  “It will be your fade away divine.”

  I. Divisions of Blindness and Sight

  Sebastion Redfield came back to life on a Tuesday afternoon. It was an imaginary day—one which took a deep breath and seemed to exhale directly into him. To say that you are lucky to be alive, son, the doctor would tell him later that Tuesday, is to use a tired old cliché. But it is also the employment of a most grave understatement.

  Yes, Sebastion liked this doctor immediately. Dr. Blake Rutherford was not akin to those other doctors, those from before, the ones who had whispered in their knowing hallway voices, the ones who had fastened his head under a fluffy white mitten and slid him inside the long gray tunnel on a cold metal tray. Nor was Rutherford like the doctors that came much later. Those ones, floating down corridors like ungodly wraiths, wallowing in that terrible hospital smell, had nearly been worse.

  Dr. Rutherford was different. He was old and serious and kind. His eyes and face and his salt-and-pepper hair were of the sort you might see in a black and white television show from “the golden age of the medium.” That’s what Sebastion’s dad called it. Not just the “Golden Age” or the “Golden Age of Television,” mind you. But full out, “The Golden Age of the Medium.”

  And Doctor Rutherford used words like grave and employment, the latter closer to its verb sense and not purely in reference to the common-speak meaning of employment—as, simply, having a job. He was the kind of man who otherwise might look tired and old, had he not convincingly used phrases like tired and old. For, clearly, if you are something, you do not, as a common courtesy to yourself and all who know and love you, refer to other things as that something. It makes you look all the more guilty of being that something. And it makes you look stupid.

  It was fair to say, yes, definitely fair to say, that Doctor Rutherford reminded Zeb of his dad.

  Where were his mom and dad?

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  When he first came conscious, Zeb lay with his eyes closed. He almost knew where he was before he opened them and felt no rush to confirm it. He remembered the flash of a bullet, falling, a long string of something not quite right—

  (stale air, titanium white)

  —a multitude of voices, the beeps of equipment, and then a long silence.

  He was alive. He knew that as surely as he could hear the EEG beeping in step with his heart, as surely as he could smell the lemon cleaner scent trying to mask the odor of hospital, as surely as he could see and feel brown-orange light swarming on his eyelids—there must surely have been a bright light above him, or a window with drapes pulled back. Would the sky be blue today?

  Blue. More specifically, Grumbacher’s Thalo blue in oil. That would be nice. Thalo Blue would make it right again.

  Yes, he was alive, most assuredly so. His brain had fuzzy, wooly, clouded thought—actually it had been hard for him to come by the decision that a Thalo blue sky would be nicer than a Cerulean blue—but it wasn’t the sort of cloudiness in his head that he had suffered through before. This was unlike the heavy gauze and frameless sight he had in his memory from—from what? From that place where nothing was quite...right? It was an elusive thought. Contained in it was titanium white. Flashes of bright titanium white, small silver specks in it, stale air in his mouth—that kind of taste you get when you swallow just before a head cold takes hold.

  He struggled away from those thoughts and tried to resume his mind on a path towards the present tense. He knew he would be in hospital—North York most likely. There would be white walls, white sheets, white floors, white scrubs down white or similarly pale hallways. Machines round the bedside, monitoring, dripping, beeping, making sure all was well. He had seen all of that before. But what he didn’t know—as he lay there finally with some semblance of thought after who knows how long—was why he couldn’t feel his feet, his arms, or the tips of his fingers.

  In a panic at that, his eyes burst open, and the EEG monitor that really was beside him quickened its timed beeps in response.

  There were clear plastic oxygen tubes tucked behind his ears and running to his nostrils, there was a blue-green surgical sling holding his left arm in a crook, and in the back of his right hand, just past the blue and white plastic hospital bracelet around his wrist, there was white-red surgical tape holding an intraveinous line. To the right of his bed, beyond hard plastic guardrails filled with large flat buttons, was a small window where the prerequisite drapes hung. They were being adjusted by a nurse in pastel green scrubs. To his left, beyond an identical set of plastic rails, were the EEG display on a crash cart and a drip bag on a metal pole-stand which blipped with a timed rhythm.

  In front, drawn out from his body were his legs under light green and white sheets. They lay lifeless.

  He choked as he spoke. His mouth felt dry, coarse and wired shut, so it came out as a harsh, mottled and parched whisper. “Hel-p.”

  The nurse, startled a little, turned at that and her eyes first looked at Sebastion’s face, then at the EEG. “You’re doing just fine, Mr. Redfield. I’ll get the doctor.”

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  Mister? She had called him mister. That nurse, that one who said he as doing just fine. Just fine, she said. And mister. Well, he certainly wasn’t, by God, doing just fine. His brain felt swelled into a skull that wasn’t
round but cube-shaped instead. He could scarcely think. And don’t call me mister, he wanted to say to that young nurse. It made him feel like someone was speaking to his father. Not him. You got the wrong guy, Chickie-poo, he wanted to say. But his whooly tongue and fuzzy brain-box wouldn’t cooperate so he just let it go. Mister, that ain’t me...

  After being informed that Sebastion was finally awake Dr. Rutherford came in nearly immediately. The nurse had held a cup of water while Sebastion supped some of it through a stripey straw. She cautioned him not drink too much immediately and he got a little cranky with her when she took the glass from him.

  Dr. Rutherford started checking charts, placing fingers on Sebastion’s throat, and shining a pen light in his eyes, but Sebastion interrupted all the terribly archaic-seeming procedures—his initial panic was still alive in his brain, despite feeling a tiny bit better—at last with some room-temperature water in his throat. He still felt drained though, still fuzzy at the edges, like the will to keep his eyes open with that dramatic light from the bare window was just too much for him to manage. It was the mighty light of ten thousand suns, that window-pane, and not just the one he knew to be sitting in the sky.

  But the truth of the matter was: all of that paled in comparison to one startling thought. Why couldn’t he feel his legs? Nor his arms and fingertips?

  The doctor immediately dissuaded his fears. Mostly.

  He made it clear that there was no danger of permanent paralysis. He even stifled a laugh when he said, “You, m’boy, though it was markedly close from the moment they brought you in, were never in danger of living life in a wheelchair. If you made it through—and I won’t lie to you, it was tight—it was clear to me and everyone at that table that you’d eventually make a full recovery. The issue was blood loss, internal bleeding, and a burst artery from a bullet lodged in your chest. But...speaking purely in medical terms... that shell was a several mile stretch from any major spinal region.” And at that he added a full-out laugh, enough to put Sebastion a little to ease.

  The doctor un-tucked and drew back the pale green and white sheets at the foot of the bed. Then, from the breast pocket of his prerequisite white coat, he drew a gold ball point pen and proceeded to gently prod the arch of Sebastion’s left foot. And Sebastion saw—though didn’t feel—his toes wiggle slightly.

  “There, you see?”

  Sebastion did see, but he didn’t yet feel. And, as if Rutherford had heard his thoughts, he began poking with a bit more force, actually leaving small blue dots of ink scattered there, though Sebastion wouldn’t discover those until a few days later. “Ouch. Yeah. I—I see. And I feel.” His voice was still a hoarse whisper and it was painful to speak yet.

  “You beg me to make you feel it now and in about a day and a half, I promise, you’ll be begging me to take it all away.”

  The doctor next took Sebastion’s left hand, the one which was burrowed in the cool-colored sling, and put it in his own big mitt.

  “Squeeze.”

  Sebastion did. Or he tried.

  “Come on then. Squeeze it.”

  And he did. Finally, he could feel it against the skin of the doctor’s hand. A wash of relief fell over him and he took a painful, yet therapeutic, deep breath. “All right, that’s enough,” Rutherford told him. “I’m old. Don’t need a broken paw. Makes giving enemas that much harder.” He laughed again. “No double-meaning intended.” He explained that it takes a good long while for a body to heal from the shock of a bullet, from the shock of cardiac arrest. A powerful invention the pistol was, but one which had repercussions uncontrollable and unforeseeable at the best of times. Perhaps there was a bit of atrophy in your farthest reaches, he told Sebastion. It’s quite possible that it took the heart a while to pump everything back up to steam. And, he added, it would take a while longer yet.

  Sebastion smiled at him. “That’s quite the modern device,” he said, looking at Rutherford’s gold pen as the doctor put it back in his pocket. “They teach you that technique at med school?”

  Rutherford raised an eyebrow, paused, and said, “Let me tell you this, young man: All this fancy equipment here can do wonders. The drugs, the defibrillators, like the pistol, all of them are amazing contraptions of modern man. But sometimes the old stuff still does the trick. Sometimes, we old birds still know a thing or two.” He tapped his temple with a finger, gave Sebastion a wink, and was off.

  Outside, the sky was a celebratory electric blue. A sheet of pure essence. It was Thalo blue, he decided, as he drifted. Thalo with a hint of Cerulean. It was a fusion of each.

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  When he woke later, the sky in his window was dark. Doctor Rutherford had returned and spent a long while explaining procedures to him, and some specific details of his surgery.

  He explained Sebastion’s cardiopulmonary arrest, explained how the EMT had brought his heart rhythm back to existence and back to normality. The ensuing surgery was to remove the bullet, stop internal bleeding and repair what Rutherford called quietly “a nick in one of the big bleeders going into your ‘love-muscle’.” He corrected himself, “Your other love muscle.”

  Doctor Rutherford always laughed at his own jokes, thought they were marvelous, and that—more than the jokes themselves—made Sebastion feel gradually better.

  “The surgeon, Doctor Marriott is his name, got you stabilized, then hopped his flight to Miami with the wife. They go every winter if they can. Nearly didn’t this time. Nearly missed the flight when you were wheeled in. The EMT reports have you as flatlined at the scene for a tiny bit. Then, you were in and out of consciousness since we closed you up, so no one’s had at you with any questions yet.” With a wink—he was famous for those—he added, “Remember any good dreams?”

  “No,” Sebastion said, nearly despondent, his eyes looking at the black impression in the white frame of his hospital room window. The sight contained backwards reflections of all the white walls, the white bed sheets and the white coat the doctor was wearing. They were each pale imitations of themselves.

  “I never dream.”

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  One day later, Wednesday, Sebastion had three visitors.

  He awoke to find himself in a different room. The top half of his bed tilted upwards on an angle. Beyond his new window there were trees with barren limbs, scraggly and frosted in white, and there was a bigger expanse of visible sky—blue again, a mix of Thalo and a bit more Cerulean. The window itself was much larger and the room’s ceiling was higher. There was a television suspended near it, in the corner of the window wall opposing him. And to his left was a pale green curtain drawn. Presumably there was another identical bed on the other side of it. The oxygen tubes behind his ears were gone, as was the line into his right hand. And he noticed much of the equipment—the monitors, the carts—was gone as well. Even the drip bag on its metal pole with its catchy rhythm was absent. The industrial plastic bedrails remained but nearly everything else that might imply the tone of a serious hospital room, of a place belonging to someone to which a bad thing had happened, was gone.

  The day before, he had panicked. Not once but twice. First, the notion that his feet and fingertips were conspicuously absent from his repertoire of sensations had sent him into a tizzy. Dr. Rutherford had eased that perception, assuring him, and proving to him, that there had never been danger of paralysis. But later, when the doctor hadn’t been on duty, he had again gone into a state of shock over the fact that he couldn’t seem to think straight. He had questioned the nurse about the possibility of any brain damage, or any other residual effects of his time down under.

  None, she assured him. Scans of his brain confirmed it and more would be done in a few days. He said that he couldn’t put a thought together nearly at all. And she told him it was the Narcan doing that. It’s fighting the heavy morphine drip he had been on, fighting it for the exclusive use of your pain receptors, your pleasure receptors, every piece of you that feels anything at all. At that, he must have looked at
her like a man deaf and mute for most of his life, because she turned the volume nob on the Greek-machine all the way down. Narcan, Naloxone HCl, she said, elaborating for the dummies in the room. Think of it as an anti-narcotic. You were given massive local and general anaesthetic, narcotic pain relief, and the Narcan in your i.v. is acting as an antagonist to its effects. You’re waking up just one little bit at a time, starting with the receptors in your brain and the nerve endings in your extremities. You’re bound to feel a bit...odd...for a day or two—while everything feels like it’s firing off all at once. It’ll pass.

  Dr. Rutherford hadn’t explained it that way, hadn’t even, it seemed, been aware that Sebastion might feel as he did. The guy at the top never knows all the ins and outs like the guy—or in this case, the gal—at the bottom. Despite the doc’s lofty position and loftier paycheck, bless him anyway, he’d never be entirely in the loop like someone down here on the front lines—Chickie-poo, for example.

  Now Sebastion’s whole body felt as if he was sitting in a tub of pins and needles. They pricked and ran up his limbs, his spine, even to his head, everywhere. Thousands of tiny pinpoints prickling at him all in a multitudinous, topsy turvey orchestra. There was music, baroque classical, he considered. Of all things, the pins and needles were baroque classical. Oh yes, things were starting to come awake, all right, he decided. This Narcan of Chickie-poo’s was starting to really kick in. He was coming back to life.