Thalo Blue (20 page)

The doctor un-tucked and drew back the pale green and white sheets at the foot of the bed. Then, from the breast pocket of his prerequisite white coat, he drew a gold ball point pen and proceeded to gently prod the arch of Sebastion’s left foot. And Sebastion saw—though didn’t feel—his toes wiggle slightly.

“There, you see?”

Sebastion
did
see, but he didn’t yet
feel
. And, as if Rutherford had heard his thoughts, he began poking with a bit more force, actually leaving small blue dots of ink scattered there, though Sebastion wouldn’t discover those until a few days later. “Ouch. Yeah. I—I see. And I
feel
.” His voice was still a hoarse whisper and it was painful to speak yet.

“You beg me to make you feel it now and in about a day and a half, I promise, you’ll be begging me to take it all away.”

The doctor next took Sebastion’s left hand, the one which was burrowed in the cool-colored sling, and put it in his own big mitt.

“Squeeze.”

Sebastion did. Or he tried.

“Come on then.
Squeeze it.
”

And he did. Finally, he could feel it against the skin of the doctor’s hand. A wash of relief fell over him and he took a painful, yet therapeutic, deep breath. “All right, that’s enough,” Rutherford told him. “I’m old. Don’t need a broken paw. Makes giving enemas that much harder.” He laughed again. “No double-meaning intended.” He explained that it takes a good long while for a body to heal from the shock of a bullet, from the shock of cardiac arrest. A powerful invention the pistol was, but one which had repercussions uncontrollable and unforeseeable at the best of times. Perhaps there was a bit of atrophy in your farthest reaches, he told Sebastion. It’s quite possible that it took the heart a while to pump everything back up to steam. And, he added, it would take a while longer yet.

Sebastion smiled at him. “That’s quite the modern device,” he said, looking at Rutherford’s gold pen as the doctor put it back in his pocket. “They teach you that technique at med school?”

Rutherford raised an eyebrow, paused, and said, “Let me tell you this, young man: All this fancy equipment here can do wonders. The drugs, the defibrillators, like the pistol, all of them are amazing contraptions of modern man. But sometimes the old stuff still does the trick. Sometimes, we old birds still know a thing or two.” He tapped his temple with a finger, gave Sebastion a wink, and was off.

Outside, the sky was a celebratory electric blue. A sheet of pure essence. It was Thalo blue, he decided, as he drifted. Thalo with a hint of Cerulean. It was a fusion of each.

<> <> <>

When he woke later, the sky in his window was dark. Doctor Rutherford had returned and spent a long while explaining procedures to him, and some specific details of his surgery.

He explained Sebastion’s cardiopulmonary arrest, explained how the EMT had brought his heart rhythm back to existence and back to normality. The ensuing surgery was to remove the bullet, stop internal bleeding and repair what Rutherford called quietly “a nick in one of the big bleeders going into your ‘love-muscle’.” He corrected himself, “Your
other
love muscle.”

Doctor Rutherford always laughed at his own jokes, thought they were marvelous, and
that
—more than the jokes themselves—made Sebastion feel gradually better.

“The surgeon, Doctor Marriott is his name, got you stabilized, then hopped his flight to Miami with the wife. They go every winter if they can. Nearly didn’t this time. Nearly missed the flight when you were wheeled in. The EMT reports have you as flatlined at the scene for a tiny bit. Then, you were in and out of consciousness since we closed you up, so no one’s had at you with any questions yet.” With a wink—he was famous for those—he added, “Remember any good dreams?”

“No,” Sebastion said, nearly despondent, his eyes looking at the black impression in the white frame of his hospital room window. The sight contained backwards reflections of all the white walls, the white bed sheets and the white coat the doctor was wearing. They were each pale imitations of themselves.

“I never dream.”

<> <> <>

One day later, Wednesday, Sebastion had three visitors.

He awoke to find himself in a different room. The top half of his bed tilted upwards on an angle. Beyond his new window there were trees with barren limbs, scraggly and frosted in white, and there was a bigger expanse of visible sky—blue again, a mix of Thalo and a bit more Cerulean. The window itself was much larger and the room’s ceiling was higher. There was a television suspended near it, in the corner of the window wall opposing him. And to his left was a pale green curtain drawn. Presumably there was another identical bed on the other side of it. The oxygen tubes behind his ears were gone, as was the line into his right hand. And he noticed much of the equipment—the monitors, the carts—was gone as well. Even the drip bag on its metal pole with its catchy rhythm was absent. The industrial plastic bedrails remained but nearly everything else that might imply the tone of a serious hospital room, of a place belonging to someone to which a bad thing had happened, was gone.

The day before, he had panicked. Not once but twice. First, the notion that his feet and fingertips were conspicuously absent from his repertoire of sensations had sent him into a tizzy. Dr. Rutherford had eased that perception, assuring him, and
proving
to him, that there had never been danger of paralysis. But later, when the doctor hadn’t been on duty, he had again gone into a state of shock over the fact that he couldn’t seem to think straight. He had questioned the nurse about the possibility of any brain damage, or any other residual effects of his time
down under
.

None, she assured him. Scans of his brain confirmed it and more would be done in a few days. He said that he couldn’t put a thought together nearly at all. And she told him it was the Narcan doing that. It’s fighting the heavy morphine drip he had been on, fighting it for the exclusive use of your pain receptors, your pleasure receptors, every piece of you that feels anything at all. At that, he must have looked at her like a man deaf and mute for most of his life, because she turned the volume nob on the Greek-machine all the way down. Narcan, Naloxone HCl, she said, elaborating for the dummies in the room. Think of it as an
anti
-narcotic. You were given massive local and general anaesthetic, narcotic pain relief, and the Narcan in your i.v. is acting as an antagonist to its effects. You’re waking up just one little bit at a time, starting with the receptors in your brain and the nerve endings in your extremities. You’re bound to feel a bit...
odd
...for a day or two—while everything feels like it’s firing off all at once. It’ll pass.

Dr. Rutherford hadn’t explained it that way, hadn’t even, it seemed, been aware that Sebastion might feel as he did. The guy at the top never knows all the ins and outs like the guy—or in this case, the gal—at the bottom. Despite the doc’s lofty position and loftier paycheck, bless him anyway, he’d never be entirely in the loop like someone down here on the front lines—Chickie-poo, for example.

Now Sebastion’s whole body felt as if he was sitting in a tub of pins and needles. They pricked and ran up his limbs, his spine, even to his head, everywhere. Thousands of tiny pinpoints prickling at him all in a multitudinous, topsy turvey orchestra. There was music, baroque classical, he considered. Of all things, the pins and needles were baroque classical. Oh yes, things were starting to come awake, all right, he decided. This Narcan of Chickie-poo’s was starting to really kick in. He was coming back to life.

Out of intensive care. That was good. Moved to what? A medium care room,
minimum
care maybe. The specifics didn’t matter. Labels are just labels, just handles to let us grasp things, pick them up, turn them over in our hands. But they are not the things themselves. All that mattered to him was that he felt better. He
felt
, plain and simple. There were feelings in his extremities and though his head was foggy and there was a distant bit of throbbing about the base of his neck he actually
felt
again.

His mood was brighter. In part because he could see more of the Thalo Sky from this window and in part because he started to comprehend what it was that he had come through. His mind was less fuzzy than it had been and he started to realize what an inferno of misfortune he had managed to walk through nearly unscathed. Sebastion had sauntered through a monumental cataclysm and had come out the other side with only some soot on his face.

There would be a new scar on his body, this one on his chest. The memories of a dark set of eyes and a grip on his throat would be irrevocable, but he was, near as he could tell at this moment, alive and ready to dance.

<> <> <>

His mood was exceptional by the time his first visitor had arrived—
what else was mixed in that drip bag with the morphine and the Narcan?
The prickly tingles had given way to real feeling and no clouds had moved into his part of the Thalo Sky. He was elated, ready to get up and dance, ready to sing a tune, even.

He had always cherished his unique view of the world, the view created, in part, by his Synaesthesia—save for those rare moments when it caused him pain and uncontrollable emotional sensation—but this was an extreme case of appreciation. For it and for everything. The orchestra was still in his head. He felt intoxicated. He felt alive.

She walked in with her high heels clicking on the lemon-fresh floor tile and wearing a mauve suit coat, cut to the curve of her hips. Below that was a black skirt falling just above her knees. And underneath the purple was an off-white silken blouse visible only in V-form from the dipping neckline created by the jacket. It hung in the right places and flowed luxuriously with her movements.

Her hair was a ghost ship’s prow, dark. It was long and it held a subtle wave. And her eyes were the same kind of dark: lavish and full, like pools of deep well water. They went a long ways down, those well-eyes. There was substance in them, perilously deep, and you had to send the dipper on its rope all the way into that shaft to find out just what the well might serve up.

Don’t call me
mister
, ma’am
, he kept thinking as she introduced herself.
Just don’t call me mister. That ain’t me.

She carried a stack of papers, some manila folders and envelopes, and introduced herself as Dr. Malin Holmsund, a police psychologist-criminologist from Houston. Sebastion offered to shake her hand, that was, he
would
have shaken her hand, he said. If he could
move
his hand.

A polite smile was all he got for his musing. But she most certainly did not use the phrase
Mr. Redfield
when she addressed him. For that, he found, he was exhausted with a nuance of relief. The pin-and-needle baroque score had now faded to a mindless background hum.

She sat in the wooden chair under the suspended television and he immediately believed the line had already been crossed with this one. But, he decided, his instincts for that kind of thing, if he really got down and scrounged in his personal history books, were as fastidious as his Dad’s old BMW motorcycle. You had to stomp on its starter bar to get it going. And you had to stomp on Sebastion to get a realistic idea of what women saw when they first looked into him. He once told Jackie-O that he always had a binding difficulty with a woman he found immensely attractive: he would either completely ignore her out of shyness or he would overwhelm her with irrevocable behavior, immediately turning her off. Despite his faltered belief for his own abilities in this department, he had witnessed, on a handful of occasions, a stroke similar to Jackson’s famed touch. He had done the former with Vivian, had let his shyness overrun him, and she seemed to love it. And with Caeli he had tried the latter—an unconcealed playfulness—almost without thinking, and she took him into her heart from that day on.

But who was he kidding? This was a psych doc all the way from Texas. What did his behavior matter anyway? She would fill out her forms, file them, and go home. Just a puppet of the shadow strings, like everyone else. Even if that eggshell blouse fell just so in a silky drape, she
was
just a puppet. And what would a psychologist from Texas be doing here anyway?

She started in, talking about procedural items mostly. Her voice was soothing he discovered, and when she smiled he found himself smiling back. Perhaps it was whatever the nurses had dripping in timed beats from that bag next to his bed yesterday. Perhaps it was this drug called Narcan that was bringing color and feeling back to his toes and fingernails. And perhaps it was his eccentric elation from the day. He wondered how foolish he looked to her. Then he decided he must look a wreck regardless of the expression on his face. A mad man had broken into his home and had nearly choked him to death. His chest had been cracked like a bottle popping its cork backwards, and he had come through emergency surgery to remove said cork—it had been tight, the old bird Rutherford had said. He wouldn’t lie, that salt-and-pepper jokester, it had been
damn
tight. In short, he shouldn’t expect this particular Wednesday to be his
best
hair day in recent memory.

But Doctor Holmsund didn’t falter for a second, not at his gags, not at his appearance. She was very good at her work, that much was clear. She indicated that it was just standard policy to investigate the victim in matters like this, both from a law enforcement side and from a well-being maintenance point of view.
Standard Policy? Well-being maintenance?
She was throwing about buzz-words, police jargon, and sociological ‘happy’ expressions left and right. Sebastion saw in her eyes a smart and beautiful woman, one who had been tainted by numerous fields of jurisdiction and countless stares of expectation. She walked a tightrope among them all. And, added to that, she was a woman. A self-assured and attractive one,
a total babe
, Jackson might have said ten years ago. Her lack of self-reference, her solid eye contact and her control of the conversation made it obvious: she was climbing among the vines in what was still, even after all this time, a man’s jungle. And she knew it from day one.