Thalo Blue (19 page)

(You love me, Jewels. And that means I can get away with anything.)

—And he had never really been able to let it go.

He could still feel Katie’s finger on the dimple of his chin. If he closed his eyes it was still pressing there. I can get away with anything, it said to him with a smile.

Though there was no logical way he could have been there to change things, though he had not stepped out of a routine, and though he had done nothing to make the events at the Highchair more likely, there was a blame that fell over him like fine fishnet. There was a set of ever-present what-ifs.
What if the director’s cut of his movie hadn’t come in at Jango Jim’s Video that afternoon? What if he had just ignored his distaste for loud, abrasive places where smoke hung in the air like a fog? What if he had gone with her to the bar?
There was a dark cloud that sat in his vision and colored everything he saw.

It stayed.

On the other side of life, the Thief, barefoot and wearing a maroon shirt, grabbed hold of a startled and confused Jewels Fairweather. But it wasn’t much of a struggle. Time was funny on that side and once Jewels caught the notion that he stood a step closer to where Katie might be, his push to re-join the living faltered. When the two traded perceptions on a flash of titanium white, the Thief caught it all and knew immediately that the title to this little fight was his.

On this side, Marlon Smithee was dead, his larynx crushed, his spine too. Jewels Fairweather was spent as well.

The Gatekeeper was gone.

But he wasn’t dead.

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Usually it was easy once they had been carried down. Usually it was just a matter of smothering out the other soul—forcing it to just give in. That had been the case with the Fairweather man—and, in truth, the Thief had not much more in him to do anything but.

Zeb though. Zeb had been different. Along with what the Thief had seen in his mind, things that overwhelmed him with a flourish of anger and hate he hadn’t felt in a long while, there had also been something new.

That boy, that
Zeb
, had bombarded him with things that the Thief had never seen. There were sights and colors, sounds and sensations. The buzzing he always heard behind his ears was nothing compared to that sensory onslaught and it caused him an initial sense of agony and panic. He tried to shake it off. He squinted his mind and threw back his head as though all that stuff suddenly inside him was a brick that would slide down the back of his neck and vanish.

But Zeb was gone instead, pulled back above.

In that instant, Zeb disappeared.

In that moment, Zeb won.

But the Thief had taken Jewels now. All of that had brought him to all of this. Two birds and a single stone had lost him a second chance but bought him a third. Two birds and a single stone had brought him here.

And the Thief was again coming for Sebastion Redfield.

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.