Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  Thief took his young friend by stabbing him in the base of the skull with his own syringe—one filled with morphine from a stash in the motorcycle’s saddle compartment. Thief gave him three full shots but after the first, Clutch’s body was lazy and drawn, limp and cooperative. It would take EMTs twenty minutes with the defibrillator paddles to get a steady rhythm.

  <> <> <>

  It had been a tough struggle at the precipice that night, the toughest for Thief in his whole tenure. That boy, already pent up on enough substance to kill him twice, still did not want to go.

  But he did. They all do. It’s only a question of stronger wills. Perhaps he could have won out if he had wanted the music bad enough.

  And perhaps not.

  In back of the club, while a crowd still chanted for an encore, Clutch had been found by the bass player, convulsing, his eyes rolling back in his head. He was lying on the wet, post-rain asphalt of the parking lot, among spent needles. Beside him, the Thief, who had been going by another name then, lay dead. Empty.

  <> <> <>

  The Thief had wanted to rest at that point—without that buzz and without police and without looking for what he had always been looking for. But taking Clutch didn’t provide that. At least not at first. He had no money and no advanced gigs booked. He didn’t even fully own that bike yet. Adding to that, there were police at the motel asking about the dead girl and another type of blood found on the bed sheets.

  He found himself fleeing down the highway on the silver-black bike, selling the guitar and spending that money on dwindling hits of smack and morphine, as he fought the addiction wracking his new body. The comedown was horrific, far worse than Katie Becks’ bloody face staring up at him from the sidewalk would be a few years later. On the road following his time with Clutch and the girl, he had found himself with heightened fevers, filmy recollections of the world from under piled blankets and views of cracked ceilings from filthy motel tubs where he loosely floated in murky water.

  From that one—from Clutch and the strawberry blonde girl—he learned about the clingy grip those kinds of drugs had. And he learned about their value. He learned how he could use them. And he would put that understanding to an extremely good end.

  <> <> <>

  Maybe God does it the old-fashioned way, like everybody else. Maybe He carries a two-chamber derringer with one round left.

  Maybe God is a gun-toting thief in the night.

  Sebastion wanted to say all that, wanted to, but didn’t.

  With his permission, his request really, Malin had gone to the house in Vaughan to get, not his paints, but his book. She had brought it back to North York, to his hospital room on that Friday afternoon. He was still in bed, but had been up and walking around most of the morning. Feeling was back in his bones. He had a shaky strength but things were progressing. At least physically.

  In his mind, though, he couldn’t lose that irrepressible flash of white, the face of the man in the maroon shirt and how he had almost, it seemed, traded points of view with him for a moment. He saw all this stuff in that moment. And stuff was about as close to a word for describing it as he could come. It was this pile of different things, like a scattered junk drawer most people have—like the one his own mother had. There are a million little pieces of the past in there and when a stranger looks through it he can only surmise what they all represent.

  But the person who collected it all sees it like it really is: a gathering of still images, brought up from the past as though they are reality. And when Sebastion thought about the Maroon Man’s mind—what he had seen for those brief moments when he looked through it at himself—he saw stacks of still photos. And laying beneath them, it felt like there was an eternal...what? Sadness? Betrayal? Something like that, he supposed.

  Assuming that she would never do such a thing, Sebastion told Malin she could look through the book if she had wanted. He didn’t know why he piped up with that offer. She was unmistakably curious about the book—maybe that was it. He wondered what it was that made him speak up with his suggestion. It was his, and she was not his therapist. He didn’t think that she would actually read any of it anyway, but she had. And, surprisingly, there was no embarrassment when she arrived back with it.

  It was a large sketch book filled with drawings, poems, and dialogue. Not really a log of events, like most journals were. This was more a collection of ideas and profound bits of internal speech.

  All the pages had originally been under a black cover, but a few months earlier, Sebastion had spray-painted it a light tan. Then, he had blocked off sections with masking tape, and spray painted those with a matted gray. He then took out a correction pen and labeled each gray square with a small, concise number in white. All the numbers were out of sequence. They looked completely random.

  Malin held it and already had small yellow sticky tabs holding certain pages. A little put off, Sebastion rolled his eyes.

  “I like it—” she said.

  “—Well I’m glad it meets with your approval—”

  “—I just don’t understand some of it. Parts of it are so sweet. But other parts are so dreary...dark. Some things make me want to know everything about you. Others make it sound like you are completely asocial and you might want to bomb things and ruin the established convention of society.”

  “Sometimes I do.”

  Her eyes narrowed, a brow raised playfully, and she smiled. “That’s not healthy.” It was a dry phrase, delivered, he thought, the same way he might have. Malin Holmsund was catching on. But then she was lost in thought again, leafing through the tan and gray book in her hands. “And this title. The Book of the Dead. Below it, here, is this a subtitle? A Book for the Living. You are a paradox, aren’t you?”

  He got up and crossed to the bathroom near the door of his room. He closed the door behind him and reached for the tie on his robe. “I think I’m going to shave and shower. I feel like a scruffy miscreant.”

  Through the closed door, their last exchange for this visit, she asked if coming back in a while, perhaps later that evening, would be all right.

  He said that would be fine. But for now he really needed to tackle his whiskers—they made him feel too old. She laughed a little, though probably not loud enough for him to hear her and then she slipped silently out, letting the main room door’s latch click behind her.

  That morning he had woken up with a dire need to tell Malin about what he had seen on the other side. He spilled it all, and she sat at the edge of his bed, listening without interruption. She reached out and held his hands at times; it was clear to both of them that talking about it wasn’t nearly as hard as living it had been. But it was close.

  She now knew of the dim gray sky in that other place, of the precipice hanging over a spot where crashing waves collided silently on rocks. And of the spot below, where body parts were strewn about. He told her about the cold gleam in the eyes of the man, the man with icy hands that locked on his throat. She knew, as well, of the maroon shirt billowing in the dead air.

  When he had finished, she didn’t slap a label on all of it like he partly expected she would. She didn’t pull a six-syllable phrase out of her magic hat to try and tie it up in a neat bow. She didn’t call the episode by some elaborate name that her training taught her. She didn’t even call it an episode. There was no mention of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or any kind of Psychosis. She didn’t even say it was his imagination.

  She just listened.

  And that’s when he asked her to get the book from his house.

  “Is it like a journal?” She had asked.

  “No. Not really. More like a set of manifestos.” He smiled. More of his dry humour. “For a long time, I couldn’t say certain things out loud so I wrote them down. Sometimes, I think, it’s easier to say things to your self—or write them. In my case doing that made them sound less crazy.

  “Sometimes it’s easier to take asylum in the madness.”

  <> <> <>


  The Thief, with his cracked ribs still aching and his breathing still shallow because of the bandage around his midriff, put on his medical tech uniform and headed back to work.

  But he wasn’t there for a shift. Just a visit.

  And a favor.

  To his surprise, as he limped in—the stiff metal brace over his right kneecap and extending down to his calf made walking a painful chore—he was met with applause, muted and patchy at first, then growing as all the on-duty EMTs at the station and in the offices came out to greet him. In the bays where salt-caked ambulances were being stocked and washed he was surrounded by a group of smiling co-workers. The faces he mostly recognized but the names were lost and they became just a sea of familiarity. Nothing more. His supervisor was there too, clapping his hands along with everybody else. There was a moist twinkle of pride in his eyes, and he looked like an idiot. They all looked like idiots to the Thief.

  But he smiled shyly, even managed to blush a little like Jewels might have. He made it look like the gesture really moved him, as it was clear it had really moved them. And then he asked Supes for the favor. Not a big deal, he said, he just needed a sling for his arm. It was hurting like hell, he told Supes, and if he could just suspend it a little, take the agonizing weight off of it—

  Supervisor Man told him, Of course. Anything. Anything at all that he needed they were there for him. They would always be there for him. They were a team, Jewels and the rest. And teams help out their teammates. In his speech, Supes even tossed the Thief his key to the supply room and from there, the Thief emerged with his bent right arm—in its plaster cast—held against his stomach by a white sling which was tied behind his neck. Now he looked like a real wreck.

  The supervisor, awkwardly, maybe still treading lightly around the topic of Marlon Smithee, kept talking—as though making Jewels feel comfortable was more important than any work waiting for him in his office. He advised Jewels to let his doctor take another look if his arm was giving him some problems. Above all else, he said, he should make sure it’s setting properly.

  “You’re right,” said Jewels/Thief to him. “I’m headed there right now.”

  <> <> <>

  Not only did Sebastion tell Malin of the tan book, his collection of manifestos, he joked, and of the frameless place and the rim over silent ocean waves. But that morning he also told her more about Dad, more about the firm where they both worked, and more about the infamous bastard, Johnny Merridew.

  In the bathroom, after shaving, he stared at his face in the mirror for a long time, trying not to see his father’s eyes in his own. Then he looked down at the rest of himself, standing there naked. His neck was purple and blue. Parts of it even looked black. Down his chest, next to the patches of gauze held with surgical tape there were more bruises: big black welts where the skin was tight and ill looking. The spots all corresponded to the pain from the other night when the curtains beside the bed had flared orange. And as he stood in the shower, bathing in that luxurious hot water which nearly made him feel new again, he tried not to let it sting those spots, instead letting it trickle mildly on them. How did I walk away from it? How am I even standing here? He rubbed the heels of his hands in his eyes, then down the clean fresh skin on his cheeks and neck, feeling it. Just like before. It made him think of that old saying about a newborn’s bottom. But the thought of his blue-black skin brought to his mind the image of rotten and uneven skin on his father’s balding scalp. And then he saw the pale liquid bile dribbling down to a numb-looking chin.

  It was still hot that September by the time Sebastion had garnered the guts to send an anonymous e-mail to Merridew. Attached were small scans of the photos he had acquired from Fish. They were still big enough, though, to make it obvious what they were. And Sebastion went with the assumption that Merridew had already seen them anyway, and would be able to spot them at a distance of forty paces. Don’t we all dream of the things that frighten us most? Ol’ Johnny probably had his share of nightmares involving those pictures coming to light. He would know what they were.

  Sebastion didn’t care about any repercussions that might find Mr. Fischer. He didn’t even care about those that could latch onto Fish. And Fish didn’t seem to care either. He probably got his job because of those pictures, or some like them, and though having them displayed like this might cost him his job he didn’t give the impression that he minded in the slightest. Quite the contrary, actually; he seemed to nearly revel in it.

  So Sebastion didn’t worry about that side of it.

  He only thought about his angle, the one where he got caught, had no income for the house mortgage, and worst of all, wound up looking stupid to all the people he disliked. He worried about egg on his face. And on Oliver’s.

  The e-mail had been sent from Luco’s Internet Café on Marks Street that Monday, and on Friday of that week John Merridew rode the elevator down three floors to where all the junior analysts had offices, and the really junior analysts had cubicles. He sauntered among them all and their heads popped up from behind baffles, trying to grab some of his eye-contact as he passed them in his charcoal black suit. There were good-morning-sirs, and hello-Mr.-Merridews and from everyone else, those that didn’t have it in them to try a verbal greeting, he was met with only a marked silence. It was a quiet respect not unlike the one that had gone between Riley Fischer and Sebastion Redfield six, nearly seven, years before.

  Unceremoniously, he walked into Sebastion’s and Fish’s shared office where Sebastion was facing his computer and staring at numbers. There was an icy fake wind of air conditioning blowing from the vent under Sebastion’s desk and Fish was, not surprisingly, absent.

  Merridew dropped a white sheet on the boy’s desk and smacked his splay-fingered hand across it. The audible crack made Sebastion’s back arch and he thought for a brief second the sound would drive him backwards through the floor-to-ceiling sheet of dim glass behind him. He had imagined since high school what it would feel like to descend from that floor to the pavement below. And with that sudden image in his head, Sebastion stiffened in his ergonomic chair. He looked away from his monitor and met Merridew’s eyes as the man stood leaning forward, his hand still pressed against the page. Behind Sebastion, he knew, would be a reflection of the man in his dark suit. The white collar at his throat would be standing out brightly, but the rest of him, clad in near blackness, would be a vacant outline.

  He knew at once what the sallow page under Merridew’s fingers was. The words he had written a month earlier were on it. He had stared at those words every day after work for several weeks, had sat for an hour or more at Luco’s on Marks with a flavored coffee by his side and then finally, on the Monday, had dared to click send, falling immediately into a fretful pit of regret for five more long days. But five days wasn’t so bad, he said to himself. He was numb for most of it anyway. Certain things have lived a lot longer without resolve, haven’t they? With Oliver like he was, Sebastion was getting maybe an hour of sleep on most nights. The eyes which now looked from the white paper on his desk, crawling up the black suit coat of the man before him to finally rest on the face of John Merridew, were undercoated with purplish-gray. And on this day he was exhausted.

  “Do you want to explain this to me?” Merridew’s voice was low and artificial. He had calculated his tone, and it came out that way. He said the words with contempt riding under his tongue almost like it was going to make him sick, like he was fighting off a case of impending dry heaves.

  Sebastion looked at him a moment longer, feeling a bit like the day when he caught Fish’s towel snap and reeled him in like he had been an actual fish. He felt weak now, not like he had the time at Landsdowne Comp. But then, this was a whole new level below, wasn’t it? Flooded by nothing but blandness, his taste buds were delivering a palpable tang of sickness and his own breath was stale. His heart beat twice as fast as it should—it always did that when he hadn’t had enough sleep. How much of his life had those extra pulses chopped out now? A year?
Two? He swallowed. “How’d you know it was me?”

  “Who else? Neither one of you was anything but a coward.”

  “What did my father ever do to you?”

  “Ask him about the Lithuanian girl.”

  “Who?”

  “Just ask him.”

  “I can’t. He doesn’t even know who I am anymore.”

  <> <> <>

  After some time, Sebastion remembered Daniela, the Lithuanian girl from when he was nine. She had been about seventeen, maybe eighteen, maybe sixteen. Merridew, his wife, and the girl, an exchange student staying with them—they never had kids of their own—had come to stay with Sadie, Oliver and Sebastion at their summer house near Edan. It was one of those claustrophobic weekends where the men were supposed to go fishing and the women were supposed to stay back at the cottage. The men were supposed to do men-things and the women where supposed to do women-things and under it all, there was a lurking promotion. The underling, in this case Oliver Redfield, was supposed to suck up to his boss. And his family was to follow suit.

  Daniela was beautiful, though, one of those girls you just had to stare at—no matter what your mother taught you. Sebastion remembered her big dark eyes and her lips. She had hair the color of straw and her laugh made pleasant, tickling pinpricks on Sebastion’s scar. Her English was appalling but they went walking along the beach and up in the hills together anyway—he was only nine that summer, but a far sight better at relating to people than most nine year-olds. With his advanced demeanor and her poor English skills they nearly met in the middle. He had fun with her, but he remembered her being near the center of some unsaid strife.