Thalo Blue (23 page)

“I don’t think you’re
anything
,” she said. “It’s not my place or jurisdiction to make assessments here.”

“Not your jurisdiction?
Then what are you
doing
here?
—”

“—I just question how a person can nearly be shot to death in his own house, can go into cardiac arrest,
be clinically dead for a short time
, find himself revived and suddenly is the happiest, most well-adjusted person there ever was. Happy enough, even, to start singing songs from his hospital bed just a few days after having his chest cracked and his vital signs tweaked by electricity...especially considering that before this all happened—”

She cut herself off and looked down at the stack in her hands. She started trying to correct herself, “—Especially when...” But it was no use to even bother with the back-peddle.

He reached out with his weak hands to grab the stack from her but she easily pulled it out of his grasp, back to her body. She got up from her spot on the bed.
What did she know? And what had he forgotten?

Green means go
, his mind said to him then.
Red means stop.

Red had suddenly turned to green. And stop had turned to go.

<> <> <>

The curtains were orange. Exit Music was playing. Dawn felt a long way off.

Malin Holmsund, the zealous psychologist from Houston had left much earlier. Hours ago, actually. She had gone abruptly, saying something about not having eaten all day. She asked him if she could come back tomorrow—they had barely gotten through any of her questionnaire. He said it would be okay. They were both a little timid then, like a large cat and a small dog facing off in an alleyway. The two of them, desperately circling a scrap that wasn’t big enough to feed either one.

As he lay in the fading light of late afternoon, he examined how badly the day had turned out. He had woken up with wind in his sails, would have likely gotten out of bed and danced had he felt anything in his body other than the prickly wrestlers as they practiced their united maneuvers inside his feeble body. And then, after seeing just a few faces and hearing only a handful of words, he was again made into a sullen, brooding little man.
Well, Jackie-O, you’d have laughed your ass off at this one. Not only did I over do it completely with her, I actually caused her to get up and leave.

A little while after scolding himself, as he had been prone to do for the duration of his memory, he fell away to a warm and embracing sleep.

Now, he was awake again. And the curtains were orange.

His body was wracked with a blaring ache, particularly up and down his left arm. It screamed in him. The pin and needle warriors had brought their big brothers and their dads into the fray, it seemed. In his shoulder there was a splintering tumult of blows and the nerves carried the sparks of them up and down. His neck was a throbbing, blistering wreck of pain. He actually felt like it was measurably expanding in diameter with each throb, like he would be able to look in a mirror and watch his neck fill and contract, fill and contract.

The room was dark, illuminated only shallowly by some light from the hallway. It was night, or morning. Very very late, or very very early. But those curtains stood out in gaudy color as if they existed in a full-out lighted day while he lay there in an opposing nighttime world—the difference of which could only be measured when you saw the curtains, the seemingly glowing orange curtains. He shifted slightly, thinking that it might help the pain some, but it only made it worse. There was a sharp shot from his chest down to his crotch and through his legs. It couldn’t go any further so it ended at his toes. It crawled throughout him, stopping where he did and not before, gnawing and chewing at pieces of him as it went. Doctor Rutherford had been on top of his game, yet again. A day and a half. Give or take. And Sebastion was wishing the old fellow in the too-white coat could take these feelings away.

Another shot of pain. And this one was accompanied by pronounced music in his ears and a sharp blast of light, titanium white, that blotted out everything—even the disease-orange drapes to his right. Behind the light was a flash of his bedroom ceiling in the Vaughan house, or maybe the ceiling of a church from long ago. Or maybe it was the ceiling of another, far away place where the roads didn’t have names. He wasn’t sure which ceiling he was looking at from this spot on his back but it was there, plain as anything else he had ever seen or touched. There was a halo of soft yellow on the white paint of that ceiling, a widely-drawn arc that touched down the wall in a long lop-sided triangle. And to his left in that world, those drapes were orange as well.

It all came back to him then, with the vivid exactness of a filmstrip. Full color. Twenty-four frames per second. Full-surround soundtrack. It was real and it actually happened. And he had forgotten the horror nearly as quick as the horror had taken to be made real.
Green means go. Yellow means wrong and orange means hurt...but green means go...

<> <> <>

It was all there. Laid out like a banquet of rotting food. In the kitchen, among fragments of that tan plastic, there were those dirty white pills all over: the Adams he had gotten from Dad’s personal ‘pharmacist’. He had considered downing a couple of those but instead threw them across the room just as he had the phone—he wanted to sleep instead. A long empty sleep would solve more than wired-open eyelids pointed at the bursting TV screen all night. Again.

In the living room, it was blipping and flashing, that TV— like it always did these nights. It held images of fast-food chains and commercials for nasal spray and foreign cars. Above its turned-down volume was the roaring of speakers to either side. The sounds echoed hauntingly down the hall to the bedroom and the bathroom. Pearl Jam ended,
The Dark Is Rising,
a tune by Mercury Rev, played, and then the shuffle feature found a Radiohead one.
Exit Music (For a film)
swelled and Sebastion’s eyesight started flailing like a drowning rat in melancholy waves of dark maroon liquid. Muddled in the maroon, there were lazy swarming grays and deep greens. Music of this sort always did that for him. Music always held colors. Still did on this night, and, he hoped, would do so forever.

He came from the steamy bathroom, fell to his bed in boxers and one of his dad’s white tee-shirts. People always hit the bottle in times of trouble, in times of unparalleled difficulty. Was this one of those? He thought it was. But how can you be sure? There was only one bottle in his whole house, one of dad’s Black Labels above the stove, so he had started into that but there was only enough left for two stiff rounds. A drop left after them but that was it.

When he came down on the mattress with a flop there was a buzz in his head. But not a strong enough one. Out of situational misfortune, he couldn’t even become an alcoholic successfully. His second-to-last thought, swimming somewhere within the lyrics of his exit music, was of a tin pop can, red, rolling down a gravel incline.

Tink, tinktinktink-tink-tink.

And his last thought—his absolute last before shutting out the world—was of the fact that he never dreamed.

He wished he could sleep forever.

<> <> <>

Behind that titanium white flash he saw what he hadn’t wanted to after coming back from death. After coming back from the icy precipice over the crashing waters where there had been blue-gray rocks and dead things on the beach. But in the flash of shocked white which obliterated his hospital room, the orange curtains,
everything
, from sight, that’s all that was left. It was focused clarity, sharp and uncompromising.

There was the death grip from the man with the bronze skin. He had been covered by flecks of blood and his eyes were glazed and morbid. They seemed to look through Sebastion, and he could see something awful in them.

He saw Shears’ snarled face and he saw the young partner’s gun barrel. He saw a flash of orange-yellow-white and felt the bullet. The sheet before him dissolved to become a foreign world where that hellbent mad man in maroon shirt tried to steal him away even further. Finally, it was the sight of that Thief hovering over him with his cold hands locked around him that took him up, over and out of that place. And he descended into a different place. Not a new one. But a distant and old one.

II. Secret Languages

The truth is that there were actually two reasons why Zeb left Vivian Leland’s living room the night of her sixteenth birthday party at Lake of Bays. One reason was the exploding white flashes of throbbing bass across the interior of his skull and down his spine—they arrived as his scalp flared with hidden flames that he could neither douse nor relieve.

The other reason was an empty pop can.

Several life-altering things happened that night. Call it a Turning Point, call it a Moment of Doubt, call it whatever. But following it, he was never again exactly the same person as he was before.

<> <> <>

To say Riley Fischer was responsible for everything would be a cop out. But to say it all would have occurred in exactly the same fashion had he never been somehow connected would be a lie.

Everyone called him Fish. It was a name garnered way back at St. Vincent’s Academy, the private school Oliver fought tooth-and-nail for Zeb to attend. It was a Catholic school and Oliver’s parents had raised Oliver Catholic, though he hadn’t attended mass in who knew how long. The old man had downed many chalices of wine since then, but it had been years since he had a wafer and a blessing to accompany them. The issue of contention with St. Vince’s, however, was not his son’s religious upbringing. It was a question of net income. Oliver worked long hours but circumstances made it tight to have his son attend such a pricy school. Though he swung it, it seemed to Zeb that the following year of attendance always hung next to a discouraging question mark.

Fish was actually a nice kid, lithe and powerful as he grew into his teen years, imposing if you got on his wrong side, but quick to smile and wildly popular with girls from the beginning. He was the one kid that the busdriver would wait on. Oh that driver would be honking and yelling and even cussing, but he would never draw the doors shut and pull away from the curb. Even as Riley Fischer, only eleven or twelve, sauntered lazily across the unspoiled lawn of St. Vincent’s, even as he paused and stooped to throw a clump of dirt and grass at another waiting Bluebird school bus, even when all the other kids had run full-out to make it in time, the driver would never rumble off. The schedule was ordained scripture and the after school bus would wait for no child. But it would wait for young Riley. And that was an unspoken truth.

Zeb assumed Riley’s callsign fit for more reasons than just a nick off his surname. Fish was able to slide into nearly any situation he pleased, and out of it with just as much simplicity. It was on account of his father’s wealth, his mother’s mouth and Fish’s own sense of charm and charisma, and of course, his good looks.

But he actually
was
a decent boy. Misled, troubled. Driven astray, perhaps by familial wealth, and the ability to always get whatever he wanted. But he was harmless. He really was. From a physical standpoint, he would sooner offer a put-down than beat the hell out of you—though it felt clear to everyone he could do both. His abuse and his attitude caused riots. His was the most damaging sort of power and, perhaps out of boredom, he liked to flex it when he could—which was nearly always. By the tenth grade at Marin High School, Fish, a starting center on the basketball team, had secured himself as the one to hang your hat next to. If he gave you a wink and a smile, your life seemed like a charmed ride.

If he disliked you, however, you were meant to rot through your remaining time at Marin. Pranks would be played, your books would be lost, your locker’s padlock would be removed and replaced by one you didn’t have the combination to. One of the famous stories at Marin was how he took pictures of a kid in the boys’ shower while he was wet and naked, then tacked them to a chalkboard in the kid’s homeroom class. All because this guy, the pep coordinator that year, had taken certain
liberties
as he introduced the boys’ starting lineup at the first basketball rally of the fall semester.

And if Fish was indifferent to you, well that was a whole different ball of yarn. If he saw through you then so did the rest of the world. You disappeared. Your photo was left out of the year book. You never made any student council positions and you surely did not make any sports teams. His cruelty was legendary but his apathy was probably more damaging.

Zeb only ever experienced two full moments with Riley Fischer when they attended Marin. And they were each monumental. One was during a phys. ed. class in the tenth grade. The Physical Education curriculum in the somewhat rigid Catholic School system dictated that those classes be divided by sex, so every class had both a male half and a female half. It was, Zeb found out, a crucial playground for the testosterone-driven male to establish and re-assert himself as the hunter-killer he thought he ought to be. The stupidity presented by the members of Zeb’s physical education class each Monday, Wednesday and Friday periods just before lunch, even surpassed the idiocy he witnessed when the girls were present—during his other classes and at outside activities.

All the boys were standing on the multi-colored stripes of the hardwood gymnasium floor, polished to a squeaky shine. They were in clusters, at the half closest to the boys’ locker room and the coaches’ office, wearing their gray and yellow gym strip—shorts and a tee. Mr. Standish had not yet arrived to begin sorting out teams for baseball. He was late as usual and the anxiety was starting to arouse.

For some, those were nervous moments—because they were unscripted and without an authority figure. On their faces were looks that said they wished Mr. Standish dead for having to hit the john before class or for talking with someone’s mom or dad out in the hallway so long.