Thalo Blue (31 page)

He also talked at length about other things: Sadie Nadine, Oliver Warren, Jackson Cavanaugh, even Caeli—the made-up dream which didn’t always seem as though it had really happened. He could convince himself that she had never even existed, but only until he looked into the bottom of a paper coffee cup with a cardboard slip-cover, or when he looked into his memory and saw the flashing light from across the way, and how it glowed outward from her in shimmering streams.

Early on, Malin would have confessed to expecting shoddy depth and little meaning in this man’s words. The paper stack she had accumulated in the preceding few days had drawn a picture of a person with little resounding value. Sure, there was some complexity in his upbringing and circumstance, but little else. Aside from his Synaesthesia, and a happiness with painting—of which she had never seen a scrap of proof—he seemed, to her, like an empty vessel. And not the first she had come across since she had been searching.

But she did her best to dismiss such preconceptions, deciding that, more often than not, they prove false anyway. And this time was no exception. Here was a man, just a couple of years younger than herself, filled with all the same angst, emotion and despair that had been plaguing her. She felt an outlandish, if minor affinity...and then she found it: proof, in a roundabout way, that what she was hunting for was not here. She was relieved. For she was actually beginning to like this one a little.

She still questioned her certainty; she had made up her mind in the past and had been wrong. She needed to be sure this time so she rode along with him, next to his skewed details, out of order and at times, entirely incomprehensible behind his own tendency to exaggerate. She didn’t listen to this man, bruised and purple about the neck, his blood-smeared eyes and strained face finally relaxed, with the usual arm’s length. She sat and heard, interjecting hardly at all, ignoring her training to steer the essence of the conversation, and even laughing at his poor attempts of wit. And she did so not as commentator, not as solution provider, and not as judge of value. She did so as a friend.

But there was an under-the-radar spray of thought, pulsing beneath her words—what scant few she actually said over the duration of his talks. It was his low state—the one he spiraled into after Caeli, and after Jackson, but before Oliver—that held the most promise for her, the most answers to her questions. She could sense it coming, looming, and wanted it a little closer than he let it be. It was the thing he kept at bay, the set of circumstances which he circled but never walked out into. Certainly, she knew the clinical details of it—she was determined and not the least wily sort when it came to her research. Nevertheless, she found herself drawn to
his
inevitable personal explanation of it, outside of the written details in some manilla file-folder.

This was the only moment when she lost it; the only moment when friendship was booted unceremoniously from the room. The only moment when cynicism ruled hers and Sebastion’s brief meeting of the Fates. The only moment when she
steered
.

“Where’s your dad?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at her pointedly and she did the same to him.

“You killed him. Didn’t you?”

<> <> <>

Sex gave Jewels Fairweather a headache. In recent years, the anomaly had become particularly prominent, enough to make him worry. Enough to make him try and extinguish it. But the problem remained, making the back of his skull, all the way down to the slope of his lower neck, throb with a dullness he couldn’t squint away.

The Thief found this information not far below Jewels’ still-present thoughts of Katie. There was an icy stalactite down there, carved from a deep, pressing need to ignore intimacy. And the need was now so strong and forced that the aversion had actually created a physical ache, so painful that it was a dissuading factor to ever make love again. But a rock-solid argument from his not-so-silent partner had led Jewels to try and coax himself past the headaches. Trial by tribulation, Jewels might have called it. No gain without pain.

As soon as he found Dalyce’s number posted on a small card by the hallway telephone, the Thief dialed it and she arrived a little less than an hour later, smelling strongly, and peeling things off as the door drew shut behind her. When she was naked, he dropped his pants to the carpet, bent her over the fish tank and slapped the insides of her thighs a little until her legs parted. The aquarium’s small whirring motor sent a noisy stream of bubbles in a line, bursting on the surface of the water.

When he came, the dullness protracted outwards from that point on the back of his head and he found it nearly as obtrusive as the buzzing he had experienced in Zeb’s living room or standing at the counter in the Pit Stop Confectionary.

Dalyce had little to say, and he remembered only sparse, shadowy words from her lips, among the sprawling head pain. Something about a condom, something about the cast on his arm, something about the mess of his place, something about the smell. But she pulled her clothes on again in the near-dark, and—with some money—left.

When she was gone and there was silence again—all except for that bubbling motor oxygenating the fetid tank water—he sat back in the leather chair at the center of the room. Solomon and Jude bobbed, like every other day, with their large round eyes in an endless expression of horror—as always, navigating this way and that in no discernable pattern.

Tomorrow.
In the piled up thoughts that ran beneath his pain he thought,
tomorrow
.

Tomorrow he would go back and find Zeb.

<> <> <>

The days were gray; the nights black.

Summer, and into fall, the year following convocation, he fell helpless. Sebastion was the wakeful dead, marching to a drum he could no longer hear. Or didn’t want to. He got on the subway, went to it, then came back. All the while, numbers in his eyes, and coffee in his veins. Eventually, he managed to drag himself up from bed in the morning early enough to catch a ride with his father—who always had his shirt pressed and tie tied succinctly.

By his third year at the firm, both he and Fish had moved up from junior analyst to senior analyst. Not a junior partner, not by a long shot, but a far sight above the lowest of the low on the rung of importance. The two even shared an office—another absurdity. But absurdity had become vague and paltry by then, a pale imitation of itself, like most everything else. Absurdity was like a stop sign that every driver, used to it being there on the corner, ignores without even a flicker of thought.

Through it all, like a pillar in a storm, Riley Fischer was a strange kind of miracle. His haphazard attendance, his insistence that his job was not really important, and his indignant refusal to iron his shirt, made him laughably influential. More absurdities: how could anyone like
that
offer up value?

But he did. Sebastion couldn’t help but keep treading water because Fish was out there in the deep with him. Stunt after stunt, strange rant about quality of life after strange rant, at the very least, Riley kept the work days entertaining. And Sebastion nearly went in each morning only to see what Fish would do or say next.

That autumn the real fear set in. It would come again and again, but like anything, panic can become artificial. It can become tepid and comfortable. Fear can be gotten used to.
Be damned if we can’t get used to any ol’ thing.

But Sebastion’s fear nearly choked him then, when it was fresh and new. He was downright scared that he might never again see a purple dash on a warm breeze or that sprinkle of blue when he lay in a tub of hot water. What if he could never again feel a cool, supple leaf on the back of his neck when a bird’s call echoed through the trees in his back yard? It was his worry that all the color and drama he had grown accustomed to—his
Gift from God
—was completely vanquished. He went to see Caeli at her attic apartment, but she was gone. Mrs. Morgan, surprised at his appearance, told him she was in Madagascar, on a humanitarian mission to help poverty-stricken citizens of that island nation. She had left a month earlier.

It was then that he took to the woods, north east of Edan Township, to contemplate the fact that she was really gone, to contemplate the more urgent departure of his Gift, and to try to restitute himself for It.

There was relief when he found those colors again. Their trusty presence and reassuring company—though in a somewhat bastardized, phony mockery of their former selves—was enough. Somehow, just enough.

Armed with that, and with Fish’s absurdity-cum-rationality, he managed to look his father in they eye over dinner, make it on time in the mornings, and settle in for another few months of gray days. Maybe even years.

<> <> <>

“Oh God, Red, make no mistake. I know full well that I was raised with the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth.”

Fish stood at the side of Sebastion’s desk, between it and his own. He was bouncing a plush ball—small, faux soccer, about the size of a grapefruit—against the glass window that ran floor to ceiling in their office. With each bounce, the ever-so-slightly tinted glass which displayed snippets of city punctuated by other similar buildings, bulking like a set of thick, uneven stilettos, wavered in a set of cascading ringlets. The half-opaque reflections of overhead fluorescents, sickly yellow and insipid, faltered too—like they were being bullied.

It was the day that dad fell, but hours before. Early January, early afternoon, when the sky was darker than it should have been, made even darker by that tint. Fish and Sebastion had been discussing the importance, or the lack thereof, of what they did each day—
every
day. Sebastion had told Fish that he didn’t understand what real work was, that he only mocked it because he could afford to. Because his father would bail him out at any moment. Fish was not so much offended by Sebastion’s remarks as he was delighted by them. Finally, Fish must have thought, Red decides to really pipe up.

“So, if you’re such a brat, then why’re you here—working for your bread?” Sebastion asked him with his tongue planted a little inside his cheek.

“Simple.” Fish bounced the ball against the window pane again. “My dad got tired of buying me everything.” He moved over to Sebastion’s desk, planted his keester on it and jumped up, letting his feet dangle. “Red. You’re looking at this all wrong. You’re looking at this like it’s a job. I mean,
it is
. But you’re placing emphasis on that—”

Right
, thought Sebastion,
easy for someone to say when they got
the
job by way of a nasty blackmailing.

“—Look at what we do. Old ladies with their husbands’ millions come in here and stroke us a check—” This was not his infamous
Fish-as-politician
routine but it was close. “—We feed a few numbers through the system, based on some financial model someone came up with
God knows when
, and the old lady’s balance comes back a little higher—all the while her kids are on a yacht, cruising,
I don’t know
, the South of France or something. Wealth management, no, wealth
accumulation
.

“We are the
Money Mongers
, Red. Make no mistake. We make money from nothing. We make money
from money
.

“That’s not important. That’s not life-altering. Well, it bloody-well is.
But should it be?
”

To Sebastion, Fish sounded suddenly like Jackie-O, shadow strings and unsaid conspiracy. He sounded like he actually had something rolling around in his brain other than vast knowledge regarding the closures on every type of women’s bra and how to mix a proper drink (not too bitter, not too sweet) but never would Sebastion say that Fish was his friend. Not in a million years.

“So,” Fish continued, “You’ve really got to ask yourself, then, what does it matter? Who cares if I show up after a few drinks? I’m expendable. Anyone can plug numbers into the—trumpets please—
Wealth Accumulation Model
.
Right?

“
Sure.
So I’m not going to worry about it. I’m not going to lose sleep over this place. Merridew doesn’t own the sky. Or me. I’m going to go out with beautiful ladies, and sleep until noon on Fridays when I know Merridew isn’t coming in. You don’t think
he
screws off to play a round of golf because he thinks it helps the company, do you?

“No. Merridew is not God. I refuse to let this place, or him, become my life.”

To Sebastion, those sounded nearly like famous last words from one of two infamous men: either one who was about to quit or one who was about to get his ass fired.

<> <> <>

Oliver Redfield was sixty-one the first time he fell from a blackout. At least, the first time the blackout was not the result of liquor.

Like his dad before him, he had a weakness for drink. And, also like his dad, Big Teddy Redfield, he had taken a trophy girl for his wife. Sadie had been a stunning undergrad; her major had been ethics in secondary education. They met at a fundraiser when she was twenty and he was thirty-five, just starting to lose the hair on his crown.

Sadie, though, had been a feisty one, not like Rita, her complacent mother-in-law. Rita had been quiet, demure and never prone to raising her voice in protest—not even at the last. She had gone to her grave with her husband, wrapped and disfigured just as he was, within the same cab of the same BMW coupe.

She had died by his side.

At the ten-minutes-past-five rush to get out of the building Oliver had taken his spill. With the world falling away like the negative posterity of an exploding flash bulb, he saw the marble floor in the lobby, and pairs of dress shoes and conservative pumps, coming towards him. The last image, blurry in oranges and reds was not of the lobby floor, however—it was, instead, of his wife. Beautiful and elegant, full of grace. And not, in that second, at all feisty. Just there. His wonderful Sadie-babe.