Thalo Blue (28 page)

Jackson was looking in the direction of Caeli and her church friends when Sebastion’s voice rose over the clarinet-man:
So...Jackie-O
,
who’s the lucky lady in your life these days
?

It wasn’t clear if it was the club Jackson didn’t really dig on this night, the company he didn’t really dig, or the fact that Caels was off talking to strangers whom she never seemed to introduce to Sebastion or Jackson. Maybe he didn’t
dig
any of it. He took his eyes off her and her friends then eyed Sebastion, looking not entirely certain whether the question had a hook in it or whether Sebastion was expecting the Captain’s usual honesty.

There’s no
one
girl, Zeb, you know that. I’m too busy with a handful to settle for just one. I’m not like
you
. With
Caels
.

‘
With Caels’. Why do you say it like that?

Well
—

Well what?

Zeb...

—
What?
—

...Well I guess it’s better that she waste her time on something like church than on other things.

That’s harsh.

It’s a made-up word, Zeb. You know that, don’t you?

What is?

God.

Oh yeah?

Yeah.

So you think it’s a farce? All this religion. And God is what? Nothing but a label for everything we don’t ‘get’?

More than that. God’s something man invented.

How does
man
invent God?

We’re thinking machines, Sebastion. By our nature. Man can fabricate any idea he wants. And that’s what God is. An idea. The biggest little lie in the known universe.

Jack.

What? I’m serious.

Okay.
Okay.
So...it’s a conscious design, you’d say? Or a convenient
accidental
sort of lie?

Unconscious. But useful and certainly propagated by bigger muscles than any individual. Sebastion, this is a powerful deciet
—
the most powerful. It’s an idea that people,
those
people,
lots
of people, hang on to when they don’t have any power, when they feel...bowled over. When they have nothing else they can have this god of theirs to turn to. If they’re sure this world is going to swallow them up they feel better if they believe there’s something on the other side, a purpose, a master, a constant, a big giant head in the sky...

But Zeb, the only eye in the sky is one tacked onto a nuclear warhead aimed at your house. Or maybe the thermal camera on a
friendly
government’s orbiting satellite...

So you’re what, then...? An Existentialist to the core?

I wouldn’t go that far. No. There’s no use in empty idealism. But can we agree that a diet of pure determinism could never hope to rule this entire planet of chaos?

Sebastion considered that, then laughed. Jackson joined in.

Agreed
, said Sebastion, satisfied. Pleased.

Jackson smiled and Sebastion changed the subject.

You still sketching?

Yeah, actually
, Jackson hollered back.
Quite a lot. I’ve been working on drawings and designs for a good long while. Ever since that mural we started. You remember that one? You? Picked up a brush in the last while?

Naw. Haven’t. Off and on, I guess. One painting in the last year, but nothing else...

Actually, Zeb, I’ve been meaning to tell you something.

Yeah?

Yeah, uh, I bundled a bunch of my work up and submitted it to a few colleges. You know how we used to talk about doing that.

Sebastion’s face became an unreadable mask as Jackson told him that he had been accepted into NYU’s graphic design program and was leaving for New York City. He had been accepted last year in fact, but felt so close to finishing Commerce anyway he thought he would end it out before telling anyone.
That
, he said,
and there’s the fact that The King of Cheese was paying for York anyway. But Design at NYU, that’s all on me. Says he won’t pay for any of it.

Well
, Sebastion said, still unsteady from the announcement,
It’s not proper-like. No one wants to see the Prince of Cheese do anything but sell cheese, right?
Though he tried to have it come out as a joke, his voice was sullen, distracted. The clarinet almost over took it.

El Capitano didn’t dig that.
What’s up, Zeb? You don’t look happy with me.

Naw. It’s not that. I just—I thought we’d be hangin’ in the same city after we finished this whole mess...We started it together
—

It’s not like we can cover each other’s asses forever...

To Sebastion that sounded like a discreet mention of the thing with the Portuguese kid. Call it a flex of clairvoyance, call it a hunch, call it wrong, but whatever it was, he thought that it was just that: a shot about an event from over four years before. One that had never been mentioned since that evening in the basement at Vivian’s place, but one that hung back in the shadows behind every conversation—the party guest who arrives and eats all the food but never adds to the repartee. Forget the topic of divinity, Sebastion was suddenly scowling and ready to argue about that night at Lake of Bays, up the road from the Leland summer house.

But Caeli was back. And that ended the conversation.

Things can be read in undertones. Among friends—those certain friends—one needs not say specifics aloud all the time, but can still communicate them with a mannerism, a tone, and an inflexion. It’s all non-scientific, a certain vibe that travels the air and pricks another in the nose. Sebastion and Jackson had reached that spot somewhere on the road they had come along together—neither would be able to pinpoint a definitive moment. But it had brought them to this, under a dark catwalk with high-hats being struck and a woodwind being blown. And it was all made perfectly clear.

<> <> <>

“How now, brown cow?”

She had always said that to him when they were alone. When they were alone and he was being quiet. They lay together in her bed, under the slanted ceiling of her attic apartment later in the night—
more like early in the next morning
. “How now, brown cow?” she said again. This was following the jazz club—following Jackie-O’s departure announcement—and Sebastion was just that: quiet and sullen. Moody and ill-alert.

He wanted to be left alone.

And it only got worse.

“
How NOW, brown COW?
” Caeli got a little more adamant, but playfully. It was her game,
their game
, one that she started and he always finished. Out of habit. Out of a genuine desire to play with her. It was one of the little things they had together in their little world. And there were so many
little things
they had together.
Just fine, Clementine
, was his response, the one he always gave before tonight, the one she always expected.

He finally smiled, more out of concession than out of actual desire to do it. But it appeased her. They read a little and went to sleep. Or, she did. He lay with his eyes open and an arm propping his head up so that a shaft of that light from across the street fell across his face. Outside the wind howled, that light bounced and jigged and waved. And a branch, maybe the same branch, tick-tick-ticked on the shingles over his head.

<> <> <>

Time carried on like a runaway rollercoaster on an endless track. He started to think the worst thought:
Can we ever really know someone? I mean, really know them. Completely?

No one, he decided, knew him. Not the core essence of who he was. Even Caeli could never get that deep into him. And she never tried. Probably because she knew he didn’t want her to. Even his condition was secret to her. Well, not so much a secret as just a detail that had been left out. How could he have left out such a big part of him? Was it just because the colors had begun to fade and there would be no point telling her about something that seemed to no longer exist? He thought so, but he also thought it was more than that.

The colors were going, yes, but what difference would it have made to her anyhow?

He thought about Jackson. He thought about the Portuguese kid and the time between now and then. He thought about a tin can rolling along a shallow incline of pebbles and sand. And he thought about the realization lolling beneath its aluminum no-named pretense. He even thought about a handful of photographs he had from years before, ones of his mom and his unseen dad when they had been happy. Just as he couldn’t see his dad in those shots, he couldn’t picture himself in them either. He remembered that image of a gray tunnel where his head had been held down—as if it, too, was a burn on his arm that could not be erased. In a degree unfit to even consider, just as in that lightless tunnel, his head still felt heavy—even now. Even after
being different
had nearly been factored out. At least in the way it used to mean, in the Synaesthesia way.

The next few months became a vacuum. He slipped out of them. Colors and sounds, pale and removed already at that point, left him entirely. Every remnant of his Synaesthesia had moved out, had silently slid out the back door and into the night where it had hurled its key into a dusty vacant lot.

He wondered if it would ever come back.

Looking down from a dizzying height, he felt the swarm of sleepiness in his brain. He stared ahead and saw gray, only gray. There was no velvet green or Thalo blue. Those were Caeli. And Caeli already felt long gone from his reach, like an after image from a wakeful dream. But really, though, she had stood still. He was the one who had gone missing.

<> <> <>

The last night they ever read together, though neither of them planned it that way, she presented “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes. And he read her parts of the “Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde. But he didn’t do it in a booming voice or with a deep intonation like he might have before. There was meaning in the words, but he found himself saving that, stealing it away for himself. It was some small wisp, something he alone could hang on to. He looked past her now, seeing the color in her eyes, but feeling like it was out of reach. And he nearly wanted it that way. It felt easier.

It was the first occasion in a long while when they had both read to each other on the same night. Several nights before, perhaps a hundred, perhaps two, she laughed about the absurdity, the paradox that was the Sebastion Redfield she knew.

“I don’t know any Commerce students who read poetry. I don’t know any Commerce students who even
like
poetry. They all like money and golfing.”

She laughed and he joined in. It was true. “Unless there’s a buck a draft night at the pubs,” he said, “We don’t come out too often. Not much for social occasions unless there’s networking to be done.” He winked at her. “Not much for rhyming couplets either.”

But now, there was no laughter from either of them. Jackie-O had left the first day of August, a Saturday, had packed his car and driven off with just a flaccid hug and an expressionless face—and all the words unspoken. And the space between Caeli and Sebastion had grown to an interminable gap. Time fixed nothing and there was no effort left in him for anything. And that seemed to carry over into the little world they had created together. Ahead, he saw the blurry gray of a tunnel where his head was being held down. And in her, he saw beauty and wonder. He held everything in her. She felt like the opposite of every place he was headed, yet was powerless to stay his course and continue in her direction.

Months passed while it died. Silence grew like a weed. And then the tears came. Huge welled-up rending sobs of anger, frustration, anguish and even betrayal.

She wanted it to not be true, to have him hold her again and read from a book to her. He wouldn’t. She wanted to get on the subway with him again and ride around carefree for a whole afternoon, maybe head down to Kensington and look in the shops, all the while sipping expensive coffees. But he wouldn’t. She felt confused and she asked him if
he
was confused, if that’s what this was all about. He wanted to say that the word
confused
was a stifling, funny thing. It reminded him of when he was six and his mother looked at his Lite Brite project. All the orange pegs had been replaced with blue ones until the blue ones had run out. Then there had just been empty spaces, no holes, just little white
O
s on the stiff black paper.
Did you get confused, Zeb?

No, mommy, I meant it this way.

Then he thought none of that would make sense to Caeli so he let it go. He thought to tell her about God, that God wasn’t in him. That he had a soul but his soul wasn’t God. That
she
had a soul and hers
was
God. And—

But he didn’t tell her any of that either. He didn’t say why this was all happening. He didn’t rightly know. Green-eyed Caeli was the white dove somehow fit unharmed into a tiny prop box on stage; she was the pinnacle of a magic trick, released into the rafters of a darkened theatre, all wings and wonder, beside an eruption of cheers and applause. Only, at the crucial moment, the height of the stunt, Sebastion couldn’t summon the magic powers to even open the box. The trick didn’t work any more.

“Worlds are made of hello and goodbye, aren’t they?” she asked him. “
Aren’t they?
” But finally admitting that this was it, she rescinded, and her tears stopped. She looked at him with her big dark green eyes, vaguely like she had that first day on the bus, as it jittered and groaned.