Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  Sebastion did not envision bursting into any of the three floors that housed the firm of Whitman and Merridew to open fire with a semi-automatic weapon. That would have been more haste, ridiculous and insane haste. But he did have visions, not dreams per se, but visions—small silent clips that would replay in front of his eyes like those of Sicily, his dead aunt from long ago. In the visions some of the members of that firm would perish. The fluorescents above shoulders and heads poring over file folders and white sheets of paper first flicker. The CRT monitors with their black faces and scattered nonsensical white numbers burst like dark oily balloons filled with glitter and smoke. Then the floor-to-ceiling panes of almost invisibly tinted plexi-glass propel outwards in whole pieces. And from beyond them comes a great vacuum of wind, a negating suction of vast magnitude, as though, clear of the towers on King Street, a nuclear void from the heavens has been burst, first blowing outwards like an explosion then drawing inwards and pulling everything with it.

  All the bodies in that space, all the horrible, horrible bodies find themselves twirling helplessly, violently, towards the gaping mouths left in the absence of those glass sheets. John Merridew is not the first to go. He is the last, fingers finally losing grip from a dividing baffle where he thinks, just for a brief second, that he may actually be able to hold on. Out, out and up.

  <> <> <>

  “What would you do, Sebastion, if you could do anything?”

  Malin had changed the subject and then changed it again. Sebastion’s silence had grown pregnant and he realized he had been elsewhere entirely. Dragged there first by revelations of Oliver’s place in his memory, and then maybe by his own.

  He finally looked Malin in her eyes for the first time in a number of minutes. He had discarded his anger and his hatred for Merridew, for that way of life. His temper had controlled him too many times but somehow, it felt like having been on that icy precipice with the stranger—had that been the Druid?—had bled away those emotions, had let them all float off into the sky. He didn’t want anything from such people as Merridew anymore; not to see them suffer, not to pay his wage, and not to approve or disapprove of his existence. But still, he thought, a slight smile fighting under the surface of his exterior, he would set the paperwork in motion to withdraw Oliver’s shares in the company and he would do so Monday morning. Come what may, he reflected. Come what may.

  “Well, I’ve put aside certain things,” he said then. “I suppose I would pick those up.” Then, dashing the ambiguity he had always used as a crutch—he knew that he did—he added, “I would paint, Malin. I’d paint—”

  Then the floodgates opened.

  “—I want to live in other places, study architecture, paint architecture. I want to stand on the Seine and eat a snow cone while I stare at the Opera House and Notre Dame. Why not, right? I’d sell everything, the house in Vaughan, the one at the lake, dad’s car, his motorbike. I’d leave it all behind. And I’d do that...I’d paint.”

  <> <> <>

  They left the cafeteria, wheeled back out into that hall in a comfortable silence. His anxiety appeared to leave him. Perhaps it was just because he was with Malin—she seemed to have it figured out. Knowing things, even if they were terrible things, somehow made a situation easier to deal with. And being with someone who had it figured out, or thought she did, was also worth a small celebration. Her clicking heels, Zeb, he told himself. Remember those clicking heels of hers. They said she had things cased. Nailed down. And maybe she does.

  For Sebastion there was still all so much to sink in. Malin’s theory of skipping stones. Namesakes in different cities all finding their ends at the hands of a crazy, cultish traveler. Sebastion didn’t necessarily believe everything she had said. Well, he believed her—all of her facts—he just didn’t know how her theories could be true. Could they?

  She didn’t tell him whether she thought Julius Fairweather, the EMT from earlier that night, the one who had nearly broken down in front of them, had actually been the Druid. But how she had handled it, her tone, made him suspect that she did think Fairweather had been a threat. At least there had been something about him that, as she said, gave her a bad feeling in the gut. Sebastion tried to remember how Fairweather’s eyes had looked, earlier, upstairs in his room. The stranger’s had looked through him. And the Thief’s eyes, nearly identical, had done the same. There was sadness in the anger—a deep sadness. Did Julius Fairweather look at him the same way? With further thought about the cold, snowy precipice he touched upon the insane notion that all her talk might have some reality in it. But he didn’t tell Malin what Fairweather had said to him, a detail that she had apparently missed. She wouldn’t need to know that. Not now.

  “What did he say?” he asked her.

  “Who?”

  “The attacker—the guitar player—the one holding the knife to the family man at the restaurant in Massachusetts?”

  As she wheeled him down the hall, back towards the elevator doors, she leaned forward again, this time letting her dark hair brush his ear and his cheek. He caught again that luxurious scent of lavender and rain and was transported to a corridor of gentle pink, like the soft insides of a spring rose petal.

  “farawayfarawayfarawayFARAWAY,” she whispered in his ear, then unexpectedly popped the whining front wheels of the chair up in the air. The two of them did a careening, zigzagging pop-a-wheelie down the hall, nearly scraping the walls which, to Sebastion, were pillowy-pink and soft. They squealed like school kids, both of them. And they laughed, oh did they laugh! They laughed like the day after tomorrow would be just like any other.

  Fairweather had called him Zeb.

  VI. Moments of Clarity

  Everything is relative; even truth is partial—depending on who’s telling it...and why. Even if honest truth is told carefully it dies a little in the exchange. And messing with its precision, just the tiniest bit, means other things might starve.

  Getting into Malin’s rental car in the parking lot of North York General, Sebastion reached down to push aside a stack of CDs and cellophane wrapping that sat on the passenger seat. Among the discs were A Trick of the Tail from Genesis, Pearl Jam’s Versus, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and even Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles. He didn’t have a chance to realize what the rest were—a hand came by and snatched them from the seat before his fingers could touch them. He got in and pulled on his seat belt, then stared at her with a smile. Both of them were silent for a moment and only the small opaque clouds of their breath could be seen. She looked out the front window, past the condensation at its edges, and towards the crisp sky, empty and fragmented by jagged wintering trees. Was she blushing a little? Or was that just the color of cold in her cheeks, making them pink and vibrant? If it was blush it looked blatantly similar to the day not too many before when Sebastion had started serenading her and the officers from his hospital bed. Finally she looked at him with a sardonic smile of her own. And they both burst into luminous laughter.

  When the mirth eased, she rubbed her hands together and, with a twinkle in her eye, turned the key and started the car. They pulled out of the parking stall and left the hospital’s lot, joining the traffic crawl on Sheppard Street. Though the streets had been cleared, she took corners gingerly, easing around them on the sheen of glittering white-brown muck a bit like a driver training student. Ten years out of Sweden, those same ten spent in Texas, and the snow seemed as foreign as moon dust to her. Be damned if she hadn’t gotten used to the heat haze and the sweat-inducing weight of her adopted southern U.S. climate.

  Still not saying anything, she turned the volume knob on the disc player in the rental’s dash and the song that came up was Getting Better, the fourth track from the Sgt. Pepper album. His grin widened again. She, trying not see his smile and make her own laughter come back again, pulled the sleeves of her coat over her fingers to make gripping the cold wheel almost bearable. The heater blasted them both and she said, “Yeah, I know. Busted.�
� The tune ended; she ejected the disc and popped in another. Modest Musorgsky’s Picture’s at an Exhibition filled the car, The Great Gate of Kiev movement. Sebastion liked that part the best too. It was triumphant. And for Sebastion, the cascading strings near the middle, rising and falling, made long strands of midnight blue twist and writhe on the dappled windshield like so many dancers on a stage.

  Malin turned onto Yonge Street. “Since we’re on the topic of me trying to figure you out,” she said, over the soft part of the piece where the clock chimes came, “I might as well tell you: I bought some new CDs. Never too late to build up my collection, right? Expand my musical horizons?”

  Sebastion smiled again as Kiev rose once more.

  “Oh, and I saw that painting of de Kooning’s on the net at my hotel last night.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, it was so vibrant. Explosive. Are your paintings anything like his?”

  “...Naw. Not really. I use more color.”

  <> <> <>

  Be damned if we can’t get used to any ol’ thing, Zeb’s old neighbor, Mrs. Dalrimple, used to say. If ever Oliver would lean across the back hedge and mention the unusually cool spring weather or the extreme flux of winter temperatures, that’s just what she would reply with: be damned if we can’t get used to any ol’ thing.

  Just like that. Just like saying that if we can manage, then, well, let’s just manage. Last year’s headline of a young pregnant woman, slayed and left for dead, draws gasps from readers. The newswire gets clogged, sending the story to printed rags and local news affiliates far and wide for readers and viewers that have, for the most part, never even heard of the creek bed where the pregnant woman’s corpse was found, where her unborn fetus was thrown to rest. But the story is brought up at dinner parties and in office coffee rooms, outside at cigarette breaks. Strangers latch on to it as a testament to the dying morals, the right-and-wrong decay of our modern world. The lapse of the civil in civilization. It’s disturbing, it makes the skin crawl. And yet, as Mrs. Dalrimple might attest, this year’s news story of another young woman, similarly filleted, similarly abused and similarly dumped in an atrocious manner, gets no press, not even a mention in the world events column.

  The bodies of prostitutes dug up at a cattle ranch stirs women’s groups to harp again about subversive men who are only able to use and abuse the female body. And yet, nineteen months later, when the newspaper screams about other young women found mutilated on the property of a seasonal fairground, the same women’s groups remain silent. Be damned if we can’t get used to any ol’ thing.

  Sebastion’s synaesthesia is the same for him. When a string of letters are a string of colours to no one but Zeb, he starts to ignore the colours. He forces himself to get used to them. And, as time erodes, they become simply black. Black text on a white background. Context against backdrop.

  Shadow strings in front of a theatrical stage set.

  Any ol’ thing.

  <> <> <>

  Surprisingly, Dr. Rutherford had not been reluctant to let Sebastion check out—into Dr. Malin Holmsund’s care, of course. It was conditional upon a return visit three days later and every seven days thereafter. His patient’s recovery was not yet full—he was still weak—but he insisted, as Sebastion assumed he would, that it is easier to get better when one resumes his normal life. What on earth is normal for me? Sebastion wanted to say, but didn’t. I want to break out of normal. Normal is what got me here. I don’t plan on going back.

  The nurse, Chickee-poo, the one who had fed him his first cup of warm water out of his near-dead slumber, she had told him about the anti-narcotic administered at the hospital—what was it called, Narcan? She explained about how his body and his brain were waking up just one little bit at a time, starting with the receptors and then the nerve endings in his extremities. It felt like normal was the narcotic. Out of the doze, out of the grip, on the other side of the narcotic, that was normal too. But anti-narcotic, that tingle-wash at the middle-ground, not peaceable, but awake, that was the alive-part.

  “Hospitals m’boy,” Dr. Rutherford had said, “are not for healing; they’re for recovering. Healing is a much longer process that is best done in the company of loved ones.” He gave Sebastion a pharmaceutical prescription for those little white pain pills, not Narcan but something that might offer up similarity, and then sent him off into the world like a father shaking the hand of his grown-up son and then letting the world have him in the older man’s good faith.

  <> <> <>

  Malin, still without warm hands, even by the time the rental’s heater was blasting full-on hot air—so hot Sebastion thought his eyes would dry out like two olives left in the sun and his tongue would curl up like a dead leaf in autumn—shivered.

  “How can you live here?”

  “Cold?”

  “Damn right.”

  “I thought you were from Stockholm,” he said with a grin.

  “I am but I haven’t been back there in years. I live in southern Texas, remember?”

  “Well, memory is shallow. And we get used to things...”

  He told her he didn’t like it much either—the cold—and that if he had it his way he would likely move to a beach somewhere and take up residence in a little wooden-slat shack under some figs where inside and out are nearly the same thing. He laughed. “After a few months indoors my skin could use some color.”

  A crash of cymbals came. The music on the stereo swelled. They rounded the corner onto Sebastion’s street. Immediately his breath hitched in his throat and he had to force himself to keep drawing in air. Musorgsky’s epic waned from his ears and the dark blue strands ended their musical ballet. He saw a sheet of plywood across the opening of his front door—and he heard the throbbing, rhythmic beat of Shears and Lip ramming against it that morning. All the snow at the front of the house had been trampled and tracked and there was brown and black mixed with it on the front stoop and out to the street. He caught himself flashing to his own thoughts of that morning: eaves, white and icy, snow-covered lawn undisturbed and without trace of even a single set of prints.

  There were remnants of yellow police tape at the edges of the plywood—just small bits hanging limp and resettling in a minute catch of breeze. He saw the flash of a bullet, white and yellow, a burst like a cock-eyed flower blooming in an instant. And a bang. There was a bang. Two bangs.

  Malin sensed his change of mood. Knowing it sounded stupid, she asked him if he was all right anyway. He said that he was. And he was. This was the worst of it, really, seeing that piece of plywood on the front door. Not even the vision of brown-maroon blood, dried on his bedroom floor—his blood staining the same carpet and drapes as the stranger’s—was this bad.

  The stranger. The Thief. The Druid. Whatever name you wanted to call him, he had been in that house. And he had taken a grip on Sebastion as he lay in the cool space between the bed and the wall, had hauled him to his feet, and had forced him to look into those enrapturing eyes. The plywood sheet triggered everything again, brought to a head all the very worst of It and at the Here and the Now, on this day, the worst was the view of that front door. It brought again the sound of the battering ram and the glimpse of the blooming flower, white and yellow. Once he got past seeing that door, he would be fine. He really would be.

  The pictures of those things, as did the sounds, slinked out of his thoughts. He managed to let them glide away and he felt immediately well again. As the rental came to a gentle stop in the drive at the foot of the garage door, his eyes—which had never moved from the front door since it had become visible—blinked. He could do this. He could.

  And after walking around to the backyard through the shrubs and trees at the property’s edge, after unlocking the back door on the cement patio, after seeing that blood, and the similar plywood sheet across the back bedroom window, the shattered television, shards of which lay on his living room floor around the bust of Nefertiti, after all that, he found he was remarkably composed
.

  Following the stop to fill his prescription for pain medication, Malin had driven him to the Vaughan house, at his request. Not to bring him home to sleep there, or even to live there again. They had instead come home for two other reasons. First, to get his paints and a stack of canvas as well as some clothes and other items for an extended stay at the summer cottage. And second, to, as Malin had said, “reacquaint you with yourself.”

  <> <> <>

  In the bedroom he saw the madness unfold again.

  But he was able to detach from it. To place his imaginary finger on his own imaginary pulse and know, not even feel, but know that he was alive. And that the event was now in his past.

  Nevermore is what’s in store, Sadie had said once. Nevermore. He smiled. And he was able to look Malin clearly in the eye.

  (We find what we need)

  They gathered up a stack of blank canvas and placed them in the hallway beside the door to the garage. With the canvas were tubes of paint, brushes and his ever-handy palette knife. He then returned to the upstairs to grab a suitcase and throw into it a few shirts, some of his favorite discs, a change of pants and every other item he thought he would need. He didn’t take any of his father’s things, not a shirt and not a single tie. And he didn’t purposefully look away from the stains on his rug, or away from the giant marks up the drapes. But he didn’t look directly at them either.

  (We get used to things)

  Nor did he feel rushed.

  (Be damned if we can’t get used to any ol’ thing)

  But he hurried nonetheless; it felt like an eternity since he had been to the summer house at Charlemagne Lake. While he tossed things haphazardly into the case, Malin was still in the basement with her eyes a little wider than usual, standing at a deep line of paintings, Zeb originals, that leaned against a copper pipe with a rag twisted around it. She flipped through them like a picture book, nearly gasping with each new surface she became witness to. She wanted to say how amazed she was with them but thought better of her timing.