Thalo Blue (17 page)

Conrad suspected Kate had heard the nickname somewhere, perhaps for some other Jules, but didn’t know how to spell it. He pictured her leaning against a doorjamb and balancing a sheet of loose-leaf on her binder atop one raised knee, writing the J and then pausing to think. She made things up all the time, that Katie. She was impulsive. And
Jewels
probably just came to her. She went with it. She always just went with things. That was part of Kate. And Jewels did have a ring to it. He didn’t entirely like it, to be honest, thought it sounded gay when she had first starting using it, but it was better than
Connie
.
Far better than Connie
. That’s what his teammates were starting to chant after his games of supreme blocking, and that one sounded even more overtly feminine than Katie’s name for him. So he hung on to hers:
Jewels
. And
Connie
faded as the football season did. By the time the Gatekeeper played his last game of his high school career, “Con-NIE! Con-NIE!” had been replaced by “Jew-ULLS! Jew-ULLS!” Katie Becks couldn’t have been more pleased. “It’s like a little piece of me is in everything you do.”

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On a nasty-hot Friday night in August, the summer after graduation, Katie Becks and three of her girlfriends decided to try out their fake IDs at a dance club downtown called The Highchair. It was just over that Point of No Return, the half way mark of the hiatus, when kids get impatient and try filling their remaining days of freedom—before college or another year of high school—with forced activities. It’s a promise to hold that summer in definitive memory and mark it as distinct and important among all the others. And that promise is, in a sense, an empty page of a scrapbook—one kept as a testament for the living of life. It waits only for a photo and a signature to make it complete.

Jewels planned on staying home with two of his buddies, both of whom would eventually move away and lose touch with him. The three of them were watching the opening credits of a video rental: Ridley Scott’s own cut of Blade Runner, which Jewels had been unable to find for rent anywhere until Jimmy at Jango Jim’s, formerly Beta The Hutt, finally gave into Jewels’ repeated requests and ordered it specifically for him.

Katie and her best friend, Susan Culpepper, Suze to everyone, got ready in the bathroom at the top of the stairs, door open as they leaned across the sink to concentrate on their faces in the mirror, while Vangelis’ haunting score echoed from the living room below. The girls were to pick up the others, Erica Schaye and Corrine Vannes, at their houses around nine-thirty.

He would have gone with Kate to the Highchair. Though he really did want to see it, the movie had been more of an excuse than anything because he didn’t particularly care for loud, smoky clubs. And he didn’t drink. Jewels was religious about health and a fanatic for exercise so instead of going with her, he sat on Katie’s couch next to T-man and Ben, his feet propped on her dad’s coffee table—Mr. and Mrs. Becks were attending a Symphony performance of Baroque Classics at Massey Hall, and they usually stayed for drinks at Centuries Lounge with the Roydmans after the show. His short-cropped hair was still wet from his after-workout shower—he had come straight from his place to see Katie before she ran off with Suze to the club. They had reached that comfy stage, Jewels and Katie, where he could pop open her parents’ fridge and chug all their juice, no questions asked, and she could press her finger to his chin and say with a sly smile,
Don’t drink all of daddy’s o-j, Angel Face.

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In the back of Smithee’s and Fairweather’s unit, the Thief, cloaked in the guise of Ahmed Izhad Farukh, lay on the stretcher with its wheels clamped down. His heartrate was weakening and still erratic. His blood pressure was a staggering sixty over forty-five, and his face was wound tightly in gauze dressing and coated in a thick disinfectant gel used to keep burns and abrasions as sanitary as possible. His eyes were open, still that way since he collapsed. The bullet from Ahmed’s brother’s derringer had sheered across his jaw, opening it like the gullet of a fish. It dripped coalescing globs onto the white coverlet of the gurney that looked like cool jelly from a canned ham.

Up front, in the driver’s seat was Marlon Smithee, one hand on the wheel, his other holding the radio’s microphone and letting York’s ER know they were nearly there, just crossing Steeles. The ambulance was speeding. Its screaming siren pierced the waking morning where countless drifting bodies still held by the embrace of sleep opened their eyes at the sound of it highballing through their neighborhoods. The whirling lights splashed pink on parked cars as it skidded dangerously close to them. Beneath its tires was the slick road, freshly graded and already glazed with a thin sheen of early-morning ice—rush hour on this day would claim itself a number of fender-bender victims. Beside the stretcher, in the unit’s bay, sat Jewels, checking a drip level. He turned to place a needle back in the orange drug box and again, as it usually did during tiny bare moments like these, his mind jumped to a brief aftertaste of Katie’s face.

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She fully understood Jewel’s decision not to come. He didn’t do anything that was bad for him. And he never came when she went to places like the Chair. But that was okay. He was her Angel Face. She knew his rules about The Temple and ingesting beer and cigarette smoke while bass throbbed in his ears didn’t turn his crank. She understood that and let him have his freedom about it—He could get away with nearly anything too. But classes started at U of T in just over two weeks and she didn’t feel like there had been any real fun yet that summer. She and Suze were set to remedy that. This was to be an Ultimate Girls’ Night Out.

She left him with a kiss on her finger pressed quickly into his chin’s dimple, hopped in the cab alongside Suze, and was off.

With no trouble at the door—only a wink from the bouncer that said he knew the IDs were fake but didn’t care—they were past the heavyset metal door and its near-equal bouncer compadre. Before holding out their left hands for a black-light-ink stamp of a stylized high chair, each had fronted the downgraded doorman another twenty on top of cover. That was a bit of a bitch, but all four felt the night would be more than worth it. By ten after ten all four girls were holding beaded bottles and dancing with moderate pleasure in the black, firework-laden hollows of the Highchair. The dance floor wasn’t packed, but overhead on catwalks, lines of people stood leaning with drinks in hand staring at the band on stage. They were called The Bush Pilots, according to sheet-posters scouring the entrance-way. And to Katie, the bush in Bush Pilots meant only one thing.

Their fantastic sounds lit the interiors of her brain but while their canned beats and guitar-riffs filled the space with a resonance that made her two-cooler buzz feel exceptional, their lyrics were terrible. Gender-bashing and crude, she thought. So did Suze. But all the others in the club, even the girls she noticed, were captivated and even singing along at the heights of their lungs at times.

They had stood swaying, the four girlfriends, in a tight circle, confused and a little disturbed at the reaction when the lead singer hollered profane lyrics about heroin and cunnilingus. One song had only one simple phrase repeated over and over again as its chorus: Chewin’ Vagine. Everyone cheered and howled whenever he yelled it and they held their drinks high in the air as a salute to his apparent mastery of songwriting.

Maybe Jewels had the right idea, Katie caught herself thinking for a brief second. Twenty bucks plus cover was steep and maybe sitting at home on the couch in his arms watching a scantily-clad Darryl Hannah jump around with raccoon make-up on her face was better than this.

Chewin’ Vagine ended and a new tune began. It started out fine, with a rhythm that was catchy, a melody that was even enticing and the girls started to dance a little more in step with it, despite Erica screaming over it to be heard, “I thought this place was supposed to have real dance music!”

But when the lead singer started into a long rap-like sonnet about his sex organ, Suze and Katie were at the end of their ropes. One line, the most repetitive, went something like “My dick has soul” or “My dick head’s gold”—Katie couldn’t decide which.

Katie and her friends were a new breed of gal. Or, perhaps, a new strain of an old breed of gal. They sat around on cool cement planter boxes in front of school doors swapping drags and talking about the oppression of their female counterparts throughout history, and that they would never stand to abide by such oppression in this, the modern day. It was distaste at being objectified. It was revulsion at being owned by anything other than one’s self.

“
You wanna go?” she yelled at Suze, “This is totally lame.”

“
Yeah. Let’s get a cab and drop by Massey. Maybe your mom and dad’re still there. They can give us a ride home.”

They motioned to Erica and Corrine and all four started for the door. They were just about to head out into the warm night—comparably cooler than inside the club—when the Bush Pilots ended their set. The band said their thank-yous and goodnights amongst a strong and supporting applause and then started to tear down their gear, unplugging amps, and winding up microphone cables. In place of the terrible, lyrically-impaired Bush Pilots, a pre-recorded mix of generic dance songs, smattered with some top-forty remixes and highlighted by the odd shining star, began to play. Loud, but much softer than the live stuff. Moby’s Everything Is Wrong was first up, creating a reprieve for fatigued minds, and the girls looked at each other as they stood bathing in a street light’s faded orange wash. Somewhere in that moment, among the writhing crowd of movement and standing near the big steel door flanked by two doormen, a general understanding that the next band just might be okay passed between them.

Collectively, the girls decided to head back for the dance floor. They passed the swarming bar counter where waitresses wearing tight white t-shirts held in bulging knots under engorged breasts were pouring shots of Sex on the Beach for a throng of mostly young men. The men whooped and hollered and bustled against each other like one massive entity struggling against itself. The girls’ shirts broadcast lewd slogans and the flesh of their faces, among picture-perfect eye-shadow, mascara, and lipstick, came off a haunted tanning bed orange in the black light.

Erica, Corrine, Katie and Suze couldn’t pass this up. They each got a shot, all wriggling and squirming in the glass, they left generous tips, and they toasted with inaudible clinks to the end of high school—already a well-used idiom by that time of the night. Cheered on by squeals and yowls of delight from the rest, Katie downed a second and a third.

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The EEG was beeping. Jewels shook the image from his mind. He turned to the monitor. It was a green line again, punctuated only by a few small, scattered upward blips.

“Marlon. We nearly home?”

“’Bout...Mm...Seven blocks.”

He turned back to face his patient, wrapped in bloodied, jelly-soaked gauze and laying straight and stiff in the stretcher. Wires ran to his dark chest where is white shirt had been ripped open and a clear plastic oxygen mask, with steam forming inside, sat askew on the deformed mound of dressing where a mouth used to be.

The body began to seize.

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She let everything go: inhibitions, frailties, worries, all of it. She danced like there was nothing to stop her. She danced like tomorrow was just a dream in someone else’s night.

The headliner was a foursome calling themselves Scarcely a Murmur and they fused an industrial hard core set of beats with synthesized sounds and acoustic and electric guitars into giant twelve minutes opuses. The effect culminated to generate long crescendos—rhythmic, pulsing fantasies of destruction and creation into which the crowd descended and fell hapless.

All around her, bodies writhed and jerked. Some were overcome with a crackling electricity formed by Scarcely a Murmur’s haunting music; it resonated in their ears and boomed in their chests. Others felt the consuming energy of every other body in that space, all liquefying and draining into one solid mass. The dance floor became more and more crowded. Overhead, the twirling lights spun and whirled and flashed on their followers. Teeth and eyes were aglow with the shine of black lights and the glitter of sequins and shiny plastics and hair tossed into the air filled the multiple levels of dance floor and the catwalk areas above them. It was a zone of cares thrown free. It was a space and time shorn and liberated of shackles.

Katie Becks, dancing steadily, sweat on her face and under her arms, closed her eyes. The world dissolved. And she was carried to someplace she had never known.

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Inside the house, when Smithee and Fairweather had arrived, the younger officer wore a sick dead look of shock and horror. He had said nothing to them, barely even acknowledged their arrival. And the older one had raved and bellowed that the victim had to be saved, “Jesuschrise,” he had said, “You gotta save this one.”

And to Fairweather every patient was one who had to be saved. The distinction, he supposed—almost without thinking about it—could be made for priority. That is to say a victim of a break and enter shot by the burglar in an ensuing scuffle should be attended to first if limitations arose. The burglar, if it came down to it by chance or by limited time and resources to care for both simultaneously, should be looked after second.

Unlike the pale-faced officer with the weakening knees, Jewels had come across scenes like this one before. Not many, but enough to lessen the shock of this one. Marlon too. But in Fairweather’s mind, he could still not shake loose the image of the two victims lying on bloodied carpet, one nearer the bed and drapes, his jaw obliterated. The other, closer to the door, bleeding from a hole in his chest, lay with a dark-barrelled, bloodied gun at his feet. Why had the officer wanted Smithee and Fairweather to look after this man first? They had shot him, stopped what could have been an already bad scenario for both of them from getting carried any further along. But they both had such dire reactions. What did they know that he did not?