Thalo Blue (22 page)

It was in something like a fugue, a wakeful sleep after so many nights when no sleep would come, that he got up from the living room couch searching for a way to end the fitful stalemate. Tearing at his own arms and writhing from his sobs, Owen, alone in the apartment, made his way to the bedroom with a roll of binding tape and a shopping bag.

His warped head was chanting to him. He just wanted to sleep.

—
just need to sleep
—

The shopping bag was sturdy and clear.

—
need to sleep
—

It smelled like nauseating hair care products and showed a smeared untrue image of the bedroom when he pulled it over his head. He laid down on the rug.

—
just make it stop
—

But the senses of those things, the smell and the sight, were far away from him then as he hiccupped against his uncontrollable crying. He wound the sticky binding tape around his neck and then with two sets of service handcuffs he bound one hand to the radiator rods under the window and one hand to the footpost of the master bed.

—
stop
—

He was certain his mind would come alert when his breathing slowed or when the room’s ceiling turned opaque with his breath inside the salon bag. He was sure he would struggle to peel that tape away, tear that bag from around his neck, and take huge gulps of air. But he didn’t reach for his face. Not once.

—
to sleep
—

Owen Lipnicki
wanted
to die.

—
sleep
—

<> <> <>

When Maddiea would return home, the bed would still be in its natural place. The radiator rails under the master bedroom window would be unscratched and her husband, Officer Owen Lipnicki, would be lying relaxed on the floor between them, his arms spread to each like a stuffed eagle’s wings, unmoving. Her screams would wake the downstairs neighbor. But they would not wake Owen...

<> <> <>

Malin Holmsund felt a little more at ease after Shears and Pinkertt had come and gone. At least she
seemed
a little more at ease to Sebastion. She even came and sat on the edge of his bed, near his legs while she thumbed through her papers. Perhaps it was the song.
So I didn’t push this one too far
, he thought.
I was sure I had, but then again, I’ve been sure and then wrong so many times, haven’t I?
Yes
, Sebastion joked to himself,
it’s my amazing talent.
Here I am on the cusp of very death, nay, the edge of doom
—

(
Titanium white, rushing water, pieces of bodies on rocks
)

—
and I’m still able to entertain the masses...

That thought, even in the midst of his internal attempts at humor, put him off-guard. What was it? He pushed it out of his head, or at least tried to, while Malin resumed her line of questions.

“You aren’t too tired for this yet today, are you?” she asked, seeing the momentary unreadable look on his face. He had been cooperative and even jovial since she had arrived. Based on the information she had, she had expected something much different. And perhaps somewhere in him there was a desire to show her he was a real trooper—despite everything.

“No. no, I’m fine. Let’s do this up so you can get back to...Austin is it?”

“Houston. Though I’ll be here for a long while at least.”

Sebastion felt himself
trying
to be polite—his father always insisted on impeccable conduct so, naturally, such behaviour was engrained in Sebastion. But he couldn’t shake a giant set of nagging questions. He wondered if his brain fuzziness was still at work. He wondered if he had missed some vital information when Sergeant Pinkertt was here. Or if maybe Doctor Rutherford had said more to him and he couldn’t remember it. There was something amiss.

If his father had been there to watch, he would have scolded his boy for being rude. Though Sebastion was well-mannered with Malin Holmsund, he gave some unsavoury answers to most of her questions and sailed around the rest, instead posing his own back at her. And she, to his surprise, had her finger on the pulse of the whole situation, perhaps better than Pinkertt and definitely better than Shears who had even been there in that room with Sebastion and the dark-skinned stranger—
Shears
had made it seem like the whole thing had ruined him.
It was in the click of her heels on the white tile
, Sebastion thought.
I should have known she was totally on the ball when I heard those rhythmic, clicking heels. A woman who walks like that, and wears a mauve business jacket with that sexy cut, has just about everything nearly nailed down.

His mind was a fumbling mess; he was trying to piece things together, trying to assemble the chronology of events and how he had fit into that morning’s freakish timeline. At his request—and actually seemingly pleased to do it—Malin told Sebastion about Farukh’s eventual death in the back of the ambulance. It must have occurred, she said, at roughly the same time that Dr. Marriott—the man who was now undoubtedly fishing in a time-share yacht somewhere off the coast of the Keys—had been snatching a .45 cal slug out of Sebastion’s chest on the first floor of this hospital. She mentioned the death of Marlon Smithee—the driver and one of two EMTs who had attended to Sebastion on the floor of his bedroom, one of the two who had brought him back from the dead. But Smithee was crushed in his ambulance unit, she said, between its dashboard and the roof when the unit flipped over on the emergency ramp. Sebastion’s eyes were glazed—
None of this makes any sense. It’s all chaos
, his mind whispered at him, almost like it was finally coming back to life itself. He had no words to offer when news of his savior’s death came at him. He sat there, semi-upright in his hospital bed, looking at Malin, waiting for more...but she had stopped speaking.
There’s nothing else to really say
, she tacked on at the end.

<> <> <>

“Where are my mom and dad? When are they coming to the hospital?” Sebastion asked her. She was down here at the front lines and she had her hands wrapped around everything. She surely had a better answer than the nurses or Doctor Rutherford—all of whom had nearly ignored the question.

“Were you always like that?” she asked.

“Always like what?”

“Singing songs? Before the...
assault
. Were you always launching into a song? Especially when it’s clear that Officer Shears is feeling...a bit...
overwrought
.”

“I was trying to make him feel better.”

“Do you think it worked?”

“You really are a psychologist, aren’t you? No. It didn’t work.” And, after a moment of thought, he said, “If Billy Shears is so overwrought with guilt, do you think he would have a moment to get some of my paints from my house in a few days?” He added with a laugh, perhaps in a manner he had learned from Dr. Rutherford, “Should have no problem getting in. Don’t think he’ll need a key. I understand the front door doesn’t even exist anymore...”

Malin eyed Sebastion, trying to figure out if he was
that
insensitive or if he was simply attempting to further lighten the mood. It was heavy in here, she supposed. What with all
she
knew. And particularly with all that
he
would know too shortly. It was clear to her already, even just in the space of a couple of hours, that Sebastion lived with much on his shoulders. To her it seemed as if a giant unspoken weight, a responsibility for good will and smooth sailing on crystal blue waters, had rested firmly on him his whole life; one part duty and one part necessity. She wanted to know whether that weight had dissolved and blown down his back like a handful of sand after three gun barrels had been pointed at him. But she didn’t ask such a thing out loud. Not yet.

“Sebastion...Do you believe in God?”

“Wow. You get right to it, don’t you?”

“God. Do you believe in Him?”

“Should I?”

“Have you ever been in love?”

“Are the two related?”

“Do you only answer questions with more questions?”

“When I know it infuriates someone. Are those questions even
on
that sheet of paper you keep staring at?”

She smiled. “You’re a difficult one.”

“You’re not the first to say so.”

“I’ll bet not.”

<> <> <>

She put her papers, envelopes and folders down on the bed. She looked at the floor, as if composing what she next wanted to say. Then she looked at Sebastion, and began again.

“Investigating officers found a few questionable things while examining the scene at your house in Vaughan. I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on them for me. For everyone.”

He knew what she was talking about, almost before she had spoken the words.
Questionable things. Nice. Non-confrontational. Don’t want to upset the patient, do we?
“I’ll see what I can do to help put things to rest,” he said to her, actually sounding earnest.

She picked her stack up again and stared down at it. She became clinical then, the only time that he would ever hear her sound that way. “On the kitchen floor and counter, two things: white pills, several dozen, perhaps a hundred or so, scattered on the linoleum. Immediately unidentifiable. They’re at the lab now. And the telephone from the kitchen wall, pulled from its bracket and smashed, presumably hard, across the cupboards, the fridge, the counter. It was found in plastic splinters. Only the handset was intact. And there were none of Mr. Farukh’s fingerprints on any of the pieces. There’s nothing to indicate he even went into the kitchen.

“In the bathroom, next to your bedroom, a broken bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, a glass of the same sitting on the edge of your bathtub which was nearly overflowing. Under the sink, a bag of fairly high-grade marijuana. Now when they brought you in, your tox-screen came back clean but—”

“—But you think that I what? That I—”

“—
Please let me finish—
”

“—Sorry—”

“—On the bathroom mirror, a scrawled phrase—it looks like it was written with a bar of soap. It reads—” She put her finger to the sheet in her lap and quoted it verbatim, “‘
How much difference does it make?’
” She took a breath, looked back up at him, and did not break her eye contact this time.

Sebastion’s head was hurting again, and the pins and needles felt sharper. It felt like the persistent little dagger warriors under his skin had sent a few lonely volunteers to fetch reinforcements for a full-out war on his extremities. He took a look towards the window and saw that the Thalo Sky had faded away. It was getting deeper in color and the light was going. He took a breath of his own and started in. As he spoke, the words came like those of a liar. They came out sounding rehearsed, sounding scripted, maybe like the news release he imagined the sergeant was reading earlier.

“The pills,” he said. “My dad used to have a client who was a pharmacist. He could get certain things...
wholesale
. Your lab is going to tell you the pills are acaetaminophen. I had a headache. Dropped the bottle. Didn’t feel like picking them up.”

—Memories had always been vivid metaphors in Sebastion’s mind, and when he wanted to think of things from the past, or even from the present, he saw those metaphors, usually the colors, shapes and associations that represented the actual memories themselves—

“The bottle in the bathroom? I was taking a bath. Some people do that when their heads hurt. I got a little ticked when I ran out of Johnny Walker. The bottle was sitting in water on the edge of the tub and I knocked it to the floor by accident.”

—It was like seeing a set of building blocks: he could remember everything about the specific pieces, even how they each fit together, but he generally could not picture the entire structure they became when stacked and conjoined—

“The soapy words on the mirror? I was listening to Pearl Jam—loudly, too. I’m actually surprised the neighbors didn’t hear my music and call the police. Maybe if they were a little more concerned none of this would have happened.”

—These details, however, these that made the doctor stare at him like that and wait for explanation, these weren’t coming like the old tried and true building blocks. These were coming to him in a completely different way. They were shifting into his mind nearly like written words or hard and fast facts. Second nature stuff, green means go, red means stop. They were empty, the green and the red, just rote ideas, and he had no real recollections attached to them. There was no structure that these blocks made, definitely not, and there wasn’t even any notion of the blocks themselves. Just stop and go—

“And the pot under the sink. Same pharmacist, believe it or not. Same wholesale discount. I got it because I thought about painting again—maybe the officers found my canvases in the basement? I felt like maybe I needed a little kick start.” He added, lightly, “Are they going to press possession charges, do you think?”

“Not likely,” her eyes smiled for a split second and then all trace of it was gone. “Sounds like they’re treading thin and the last thing they need is for you to hit them with a suit because one of
theirs
nearly killed you.” They both paused, and then she broke the reprieve. “And the telephone?”

“My partner at the firm—I guess you’d call him that—rang the phone until I answered. Said the final decision had been made. I was out.”

<> <> <>

They sat for a moment, looking at each other, looking past each other. She was still holding her stack of papers, but didn’t thumb through them.

“Those answers were a little quick,” she said at last. “Did you practice them?”

His disbelief was obvious. “What, you think I made that all up?” His voice was raised now, despite how it hurt and scratched, particularly since he had done his impromptu karaoke number. “I get it. You think I’m
what
, what’s the proper politically correct term these days?
Mentally unbalanced
?
Clinically depressed
? Experiencing a
pre-life crisis
?”