Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  In his head was Malin telling him, Hey, keep breathing.

  He felt warm, despite the snow on his bare feet, and he heard his own wheezing, but he did not feel frantic. Keep breathing, she said to him. He thought he may just fall forward into a nest of blankets and pillows for a long rest and he suspected, as David closed the gap between them, that the rest would be coming, but the pillows might not.

  Keep Breathing, he heard.

  And then there was another voice, not God’s, only that of his own father: Go get your mother!

  They intertwined, the voices, mingled, became like the confused view of oak branches against sky, no real understanding of which shoot belongs to which limb: Go Get Your Mother Keep Breathing Go Get Your Mother Keep Breathing Go Get Your Mother Keep Breathing...

  His sight was jittery like a film reel that had jumped the tracks of the projector but kept rolling. Behind him, above a blotch of swimming maroon, the face with bared teeth blurred like that slow sluggish vision one might have after a few drinks or a draining and life-threatening fever. The air was stale and his tongue ran against his teeth. They felt unnatural. He sucked in more gulps of that emptiness but they did nothing to satiate. His lungs no longer ached like they had under the ice water, but they didn’t feel good either. They felt missing entirely.

  —GOGETYOURMOTHERKEEPBREATHINGGOGETYOURMOTHER

  KEEPBREATHINGGOGETYOURMOTHERKEEPBREATHING

  GOGETYOURMOTHERKEEPBREATHING—

  The horizon abruptly vanished. Like a large piece of torn paper, it suddenly became a jagged edge before his feet. He came to a dead stop, inertia threatening to force him over the edge that had suddenly become. His arms fanned like a windmill and he regained balance, sending only a few stones and some puffs of dead snow over the precipice that had materialized in front of him. There was nowhere to go but down to those waves; he would be caught and then held with his head dangling over a rocky border. He knew as much.

  He witnessed again those rocks two hundred feet below. They were bathed in foamy, breaking waves from an endless ocean and they were without sound. Were those body parts laying down there?

  Behind him was the man in the maroon shirt.

  Zeb felt the life being sucked out of him. He whirled to find a hand wrapping snake-like around his neck. The other groped and cupped his face at the chin like a clamp. His own fists, reflexive, struck at the man’s temples, doing little good. He tasted dead air in his mouth and he imagined becoming a part of that air, just a fading whiff of nothingness stranded in this place where the time didn’t seem to move properly. His eyes blurred, the landscape of snow and rock shifted, and he looked lazily into the eyes of David, the maroon man.

  He noticed his own hands then, batting at Maroon Man’s face and neck, and he caught hold of an impossible detail to cling to in such an absurd scenario. His palm, his left, where a tooth of wood from the Charlemagne house’s deck had dug in and stung him was pristine. The pine dagger was not there, there was no sting, and no blood. The skin was untouched.

  Change is what happens to the strong.

  The notion arrived out of nowhere, arrived from the sight of his unmarked left palm. It made those other voices vanish, proof that in this place, as with nearly everything of value, most things of importance come at you out of the blue. And this alien notion saved him in that instant.

  The flash of titanium white arrived, just like the bursts of it he used to see in front of his unsuspecting eyes at the raves and the clubs, and that one time at the Leland summer home.

  He saw his own face then, himself looking tired, strung out and old. He saw his father’s features in his own, and he saw a white dress shirt like Oliver used to wear.

  But that shirt was not Oliver’s. Neither were the gray slacks that Zeb was wearing; they belonged to the man who held him down. The traded perspective held—Change is what happens to the strong—almost as though Zeb’s attraction to seeing more had kept him inside David a moment longer. Somehow. There was a daunting, confused, warbled set of voices within that space as he looked at his own oddly comforted visage. There was insanity and he paged through this man’s history with deft mental fingertips. David Langtree, wife to Leighton Ashbury. Oh he loved her so...

  He saw those daughters, princess-girls with dark hair and large eyes: Ashleigh and Davina. They both looked like their mother and their stillborn baby sister did too.

  Looking into an unfolding storybook of pictures and words, he saw David’s life in an instantaneous eternity. And then he saw his own mother, clinging in her maroon blouse to a tree root, up to neck in foam water, on a cold November night.

  In Sadie there was panic, thoughts of her little boy at home under his blue bedspread, thoughts of her little sister alone and ruined, laying naked in a strange place, and thoughts of a strange man’s lips and smooth face, not her husband’s.

  In Zeb there was understanding, like a single drop of water, clean and fresh.

  In David, finally clutching the face of his prize, there was the hate, springing up like it was new.

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  “Do you believe in human feelings so strong that laws of the universe—perhaps even those of life and death—can be ignored? Broken even?”

  “Yes,” Zeb said without hesitation.

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  In a strange sense, his mother, Sadie Nadine Redfield, against all odds, had come back to her son. Sadie was the first; David pulled her down to that mysterious place on the other side of this reality without meaning to. It just happened.

  Black like the hair on his daughters’ heads, it was as though he held a lump of coal in his hand and all the sadness, bitterness and blame squeezed it so tight that it turned to diamond in his palm. Within that diamond was a fragment of moment, a place where he arrived several times over in the coming years.

  And in that place, the first night, as funny time ticked down and sickly air drew in and out of his lungs, he found himself mangling Sadie, attacking her, hoisting her above his head in anguish, and pitching her over the precipice and into the waves.

  In her head, before she went all the way over with a silent scream, he saw only what was in her thoughts in that last second before she drowned. Her little boy. The names Sebastion and William were fuzzy and they sat on top of one another nearly unreadable. Built from a newspaper clipping kept in a drawer, there was an image of a young woman, nearly identical to herself and laying nude on a sagging hotel room bed of golds and oranges and browns. And there was an image of a little boy, the back of his head, disheveled hair in the heat of an August afternoon. He was looking out past a set of iron bars to the rippled water of a blue lake. There was a man on that lake and his arm grew hesitantly into the air while a boat carried him away.

  With only those pieces, incomplete, and hunting for years in vain through a kind of hell he didn’t know existed, David came across the young man who thought of himself as Zeb and most assuredly not Red. They traded sight as well, just as David had done with the boy’s mother. He saw the same things in each.

  And, as he had been doing since the beginning, he sought to trade her little boy’s life for those of his dead girls. She had taken his. He would take hers.

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  How long does an epiphany take? For Zeb his started somewhere over the precipice the night a bullet entered his body...and it came to its completion during a second moment over the same straight-down drop.

  He had laughed once, to himself, had laughed thinking how absurd it was that the combined wills—a group of commuters standing on a subway platform—should be able to make a train arrive from its segue of tardiness. No, it’s not the wills of many that can make magic; it’s the will of one. Zeb saw himself in a grain of sand. He saw the whole world in a grain of sand. They were the same, he and the world. And he understood.

  The comprehension came tied to the train of David’s insides. He was himself again and the Druid was no longer a threat. Not here and not anywhere.

  He saw divinity as
a reflection in his own pupil.

  In that made-up space between life and death, Zeb blinked. And in that blink, his will took control.

  The ice, snow and cold were gone.

  Zeb had taken the reigns, had taken the strings, had reinvented the world.

  He felt warm beach sand under his heels. He looked past the man in the maroon shirt and there was a Thalo Sky of electric blue. It had a horizon line, dotted with a row of wooden shacks and gently waving trees. The sun dawned in an instant, and the two souls were bathed in glorious light.

  Below them, the expanse of the drop from the precipice’s height was nearly gone. The waves settled only a short distance beneath them with an audible tingle-wash as waves should sound. From David Langtree’s mind there came terrible thoughts which Zeb could hear in his head. Sputtering and convoluted, pock-marked by echo, they came a bit like the sound of the waves.

  —We are our father’s sons. Ourfather’ssonsOurfather’s—

  Then, like stop-motion, tricking the eye and betraying what should be expected, David’s hand, the one which constricted Zeb’s throat, was gone. Just gone, like it had not been a part of him ever before. And his other, the one which pressed at the boy’s jaw, felt like a lazy piece of plastic film.

  —They have given us only words. Onlywords. Givenonlywords.

  Zeb hurled the body away from him with nearly no effort at all. David skidded in the sand with a look of shock.

  —And their eyes to see. ToseeToseeTosee—Toseeeeee...

  Zeb stood in the sand, turned, looked over the edge and past the smooth rock overturn of this new boundary. The sound of the water was a patter like rain, broad and inviting, not loud and thunderous. He was not more than fifteen feet above the writhing top face, a glittering plate of polished metal. Light from the sun, as it moved visibly yet not swiftly in the sky, caught the spider web of foam which lolled on the skin of the sea. It sent a spangle of hazy dappled patterns across his face. He could not see them, but knew they were there. Below, close to him, there were no bodies on rocks, only color. The warm tans of sand, the reds of shale, the blues and greens and sea-foam whites of agitated ocean surf. The body’s extreme edge lay at an infinity.

  The Druid, with panic in his face, scrambled up and towards Zeb with his maroon shirt sleeve flapping indolently where once there had been an arm to reach out. But his distance from Zeb had been exaggerated, stretched out like a telescope. He was impossibly far away in the hot sand.

  Zeb, merely serene and solitary, hovering like a spirit on the edge of the sea, placed his palms together and extended his arms to the untarnished sheet before him. His reply to David came on a wisp of wind they both could hear in their heads:

  —Only their eyes to see? Only their words?

  —Yes!

  —No. We have our own too.

  He stood there for either an eternity or an eye-blink; time was funny on this other side—sometimes a runaway train following a set of tracks into Niagara, sometimes an inchworm crawling on a wire stretched from the earth to the moon.

  There was nothing on the horizon but color.

  He imagined the water would be warm.

  He saw no shadows.

  He took a last look back at the Druid, left him, and on one final burst of titanium white, dove into the sea.

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  The kiss of life came; a wish so powerful, a will so fervent, it could not be denied. It takes more than a heartbeat to claim life. A gift, particularly that one, has two parts; the offering and the reception.

  There was an explosion in his head. Behind his eyes, nothingness. As the blast faded to a gurgle-churn of water in his ears, Zeb struggled free of a grip in the cold depths of Charlemagne Lake. David Langtree—the Druid—descended into the blackness, arms and fingers outstretched, without stirring, without protest. The last thought in his troubled mind was not of his two daughters, his princesses, but instead of his two boys. His two cherub boys with hair of gold.

  There were sirens in the thick of Zeb’s dark head now.

  He crawled through an eternity of time and cold water, his eyes still shut tight. He felt his way across the under belly ceiling of glassy ice, found a hole, and broke the surface for air. He spat ice water from his lungs, and the glass held like a salver as he eased out into the cold night air. The temperature blasted him and he thought for certain that he could not be alive.

  Breathing, convulsing, choking, he turned on to his back, propping himself at his elbows, the freezing skin of his face crystallizing under a murky sky of blue velvet. There was a sliver of pine from the deck railing under the skin of his left palm. It was the radiant orange sting of a bumblebee. Under his taut eyelids, in a fog of worn thought, he pictured the world. The atmosphere and earth that contained him at that moment wore a drawn set of drapes which he had pulled shut with a pure desire...and he could paint them any color he wanted.

  His arms gave way.

  He collapsed.

  He passed out.

  At the edge of the lake, the other side of it, an Edan fire truck had pulled up to the Redfield summer home. Fire fighters would use sledge hammers to finally pry open the gates and send them snaking to the gravel- and ice-covered ground with a crash. The triplet pines would be saved but the house would be destroyed, along with all of its contents. It was to become a pile of cinders and colorless ash, with not even a foundation left. In spring, the space where it sat would be barren and new, even allowing sprigs of clover and blades of grass to shoot up and face a Thalo Blue sky among the skeletons of devastation. It was Cerulean too, that sky. It was both.

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  Sebastion Redfield awoke to the squeak-crunch of footsteps approaching in snow. He lay unmoving, as before, and his mind came alive to this reality. He opened his eyes. For the rest of his time, ever after, he was wide awake.

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  About The Author // Jason McIntyre

  Born on the prairies, Jason McIntyre eventually lived and worked on Vancouver Island where the vibrant characters and vivid surroundings stayed with him and coalesced into what would become his debut novel, On The Gathering Storm. Before his time as an editor, writer and communications professional, he spent several years as a graphic designer and commercial artist. THALO BLUE is his second novel.

  Learn more and connect with the author at

  www.theFarthestReaches.com

  An excerpt from

  On The Gathering Storm

  A Novel by

  Jason McIntyre

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  Copyright © 2010 Jason McIntyre

  www.theFarthestReaches.com

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  One

  Hannah Heads for Colwood

  Hannah Garretty waits out a red light in her VW Rabbit when the world disappears.

  Absently tapping her finger to the song on the radio—all grown up now, not like before—she’s stopped in the left-hand turning lane of Craigflower Road, ready to head down island toward Metchosin. The light standards, the cracked floor of the intersection, the concrete curbs, the shrubs and tall grasses, the windshield itself, just dissolve away. Her camera, her lenses, her tripod and spare canisters of film, all her gear, was in the hatch behind the back seat. But now it’s gone. Everything is gone.

  Hannah Garretty sees things. She’s always seen things. She’s a photographer and a good one too, so she sees regular, everyday things in a different way than most. But this is different. Tiny stolen moments like these are more than creative vision, more than simple daydreams. What Hannah sees are glossy postcards of the Yet to Come, held before her mind’s eye for a fraction of a second, then yanked from view without reason and never seen again. But they stay with her, these fraction-grasps of second sight, like the bloody spot burned on a retina after staring right at the sun: not a perfect reproduction, but a blurry and pale recording of the original.

  She’s first in a long line of commuters and summer vacationers, some heading home after a long work day and fuming at th
e traffic, others hoping to make good time and be at the campgrounds or the motel before sundown. Held taut as the outside world dismantles piece by piece, she tries to sit stolid in the driver’s seat, tries not to let herself panic. It’s hot. Drought conditions, the end of a second full week without rain. It’s stifling inside the Rabbit. Hannah has all the windows down, and a breeze hotter than it should be, even for August on Vancouver Island, plays with her fine strands of hair. She keeps her neck stiff and strained. Beads of sweat form on her forehead and between her eyebrows and she worries about her makeup running. That’s all she needs right now, she thinks, willing herself not to wipe at her face with the dirty heel of a hand. She’s wishing her housemate, Beta, is here to slap a cool bottle of water into her hand and say with that know-it-all tone of hers, “You need to hydrate, Han.” She contemplates when next she can wash her face as the brutal glimpse comes on like a burn. It’s the second-to-last she’ll ever see. She hasn’t had a Grasp in a long, long time, and tries to blink it away. Like all the other spoiled negatives she’s seen in her life, it stays.

  Hannah doesn’t realize she’s holding her breath.

  The vista beyond her rabbit’s dashboard peels away, and the inside of the fraction-grasp replaces it. She sees skin. An up-close view of a pale cheekbone. There is an eye, the whites of it filled with blood, the rest looking black and sick. Puffiness begins to overtake the cheek bone and the outward corner of the bloodied eye. Her view inside the Grasp pulls back, like zooming out to the original breadth of a negative before it was cropped in close: an aging bruise, hit again before healing; a line of blood from a nostril, running towards the corner of a mouth.