Thalo Blue (41 page)

The bodies of prostitutes dug up at a cattle ranch stirs women’s groups to harp again about subversive men who are only able to use and abuse the female body. And yet, nineteen months later, when the newspaper screams about other young women found mutilated on the property of a seasonal fairground, the same women’s groups remain silent.
Be damned if we can’t get used to any ol’ thing
.

Sebastion’s synaesthesia is the same for him. When a string of letters are a string of colours to no one but Zeb, he starts to ignore the colours. He forces himself to get used to them. And, as time erodes, they become simply black. Black text on a white background. Context against backdrop.

Shadow strings in front of a theatrical stage set.

Any ol’ thing.

<> <> <>

Surprisingly, Dr. Rutherford had not been reluctant to let Sebastion check out—into Dr. Malin Holmsund’s care, of course. It was conditional upon a return visit three days later and every seven days thereafter. His patient’s recovery was not yet full—he was still weak—but he insisted, as Sebastion assumed he would, that it is easier to get better when one resumes his normal life.
What on earth is normal for me?
Sebastion wanted to say, but didn’t.
I want to break out of normal. Normal is what got me here. I don’t plan on going back.

The nurse, Chickee-poo, the one who had fed him his first cup of warm water out of his near-dead slumber, she had told him about the anti-narcotic administered at the hospital—what was it called,
Narcan
? She explained about how his body and his brain were waking up just one little bit at a time, starting with the receptors and then the nerve endings in his extremities. It felt like
normal
was the narcotic. Out of the doze, out of the grip, on the other side of the narcotic, that was normal too. But
anti-narcotic
, that tingle-wash at the middle-ground, not peaceable, but awake, that was the
alive-part.

“Hospitals m’boy,” Dr. Rutherford had said, “are not for healing; they’re for
recovering
. Healing is a much longer process that is best done in the company of loved ones.” He gave Sebastion a pharmaceutical prescription for those little white pain pills, not Narcan but something that might offer up similarity, and then sent him off into the world like a father shaking the hand of his grown-up son and then letting the world have him in the older man’s good faith.

<> <> <>

Malin, still without warm hands, even by the time the rental’s heater was blasting full-on hot air—so hot Sebastion thought his eyes would dry out like two olives left in the sun and his tongue would curl up like a dead leaf in autumn—shivered.

“How can you
live
here?”

“Cold?”

“
Damn right
.”

“I thought you were from Stockholm,” he said with a grin.

“I am but I haven’t been back there in years. I live in southern Texas,
remember
?”

“Well, memory is shallow. And we get used to things...”

He told her he didn’t like it much either—the cold—and that if he had it his way he would likely move to a beach somewhere and take up residence in a little wooden-slat shack under some figs where inside and out are nearly the same thing. He laughed. “After a few months indoors my skin could use some color.”

A crash of cymbals came. The music on the stereo swelled. They rounded the corner onto Sebastion’s street. Immediately his breath hitched in his throat and he had to force himself to keep drawing in air. Musorgsky’s epic waned from his ears and the dark blue strands ended their musical ballet. He saw a sheet of plywood across the opening of his front door—and he
heard
the throbbing, rhythmic beat of Shears and Lip ramming against it that morning. All the snow at the front of the house had been trampled and tracked and there was brown and black mixed with it on the front stoop and out to the street. He caught himself flashing to his own thoughts of that morning: eaves, white and icy, snow-covered lawn undisturbed and without trace of even a single set of prints.

There were remnants of yellow police tape at the edges of the plywood—just small bits hanging limp and resettling in a minute catch of breeze. He saw the flash of a bullet, white and yellow, a burst like a cock-eyed flower blooming in an instant. And a bang. There was a bang.
Two
bangs.

Malin sensed his change of mood. Knowing it sounded stupid, she asked him if he was all right anyway. He said that he was. And he was. This was the worst of it, really, seeing that piece of plywood on the front door. Not even the vision of brown-maroon blood, dried on his bedroom floor—
his
blood staining the same carpet and drapes as the
stranger’s
—was this bad.

The stranger. The Thief. The Druid. Whatever name you wanted to call him, he had been
in that house
. And he had taken a grip on Sebastion as he lay in the cool space between the bed and the wall, had hauled him to his feet, and had forced him to look into those enrapturing eyes. The plywood sheet triggered everything again, brought to a head all the very worst of
It
and at the Here and the Now, on
this
day, the worst was the view of that front door. It brought again the sound of the battering ram and the glimpse of the blooming flower, white and yellow. Once he got past seeing that door, he would be fine. He really would be.

The pictures of those things, as did the sounds, slinked out of his thoughts. He managed to let them glide away and he felt immediately well again. As the rental came to a gentle stop in the drive at the foot of the garage door, his eyes—which had never moved from the front door since it had become visible—blinked. He could do this. He
could
.

And after walking around to the backyard through the shrubs and trees at the property’s edge, after unlocking the back door on the cement patio, after seeing that blood, and the similar plywood sheet across the back bedroom window, the shattered television, shards of which lay on his living room floor around the bust of Nefertiti, after all that, he found he was remarkably composed.

Following the stop to fill his prescription for pain medication, Malin had driven him to the Vaughan house, at his request. Not to bring him home to sleep there, or even to
live
there again. They had instead come home for two other reasons. First, to get his paints and a stack of canvas as well as some clothes and other items for an extended stay at the summer cottage. And second, to, as Malin had said, “
reacquaint you with yourself
.”

<> <> <>

In the bedroom he saw the madness unfold again.

But he was able to detach from it. To place his imaginary finger on his own imaginary pulse and know, not even feel, but
know
that he was alive. And that the event was now in his past.

Nevermore is what’s in store
, Sadie had said once. Nevermore. He smiled. And he was able to look Malin clearly in the eye.

(
We find what we need
)

They gathered up a stack of blank canvas and placed them in the hallway beside the door to the garage. With the canvas were tubes of paint, brushes and his ever-handy palette knife. He then returned to the upstairs to grab a suitcase and throw into it a few shirts, some of his favorite discs, a change of pants and every other item he thought he would need. He didn’t take
any
of his father’s things, not a shirt and not a single tie. And he didn’t purposefully look away from the stains on his rug, or away from the giant marks up the drapes. But he didn’t look directly
at
them either.

(
We get used to things
)

Nor did he feel rushed.

(
Be damned if we can’t get used to any ol’ thing
)

But he hurried nonetheless; it felt like an eternity since he had been to the summer house at Charlemagne Lake. While he tossed things haphazardly into the case, Malin was still in the basement with her eyes a little wider than usual, standing at a deep line of paintings, Zeb originals, that leaned against a copper pipe with a rag twisted around it. She flipped through them like a picture book, nearly gasping with each new surface she became witness to. She wanted to say how amazed she was with them but thought better of her timing.

The two ascended from the basement after he came to get her and they emerged into the back yard at the kitchen door.

The air was amicable, holding only a small, open palm of frigid air from the west. The sky was a dim blue near the horizon, intensifying to full-out electricity at the peak of its dome. Sebastion’s gaze came from that spot downwards to settle on his childhood playground—the massive yard where his life was lived for years and years. Under the trampled snow was the lawn, brown and dead now, but lush and satin green in his memory. All around were the shrubs and trees, his castles, the homes of his invented stories and adventures. On quiet afternoons, when there were no adventures to be played out, he would sit in the middle of the yard and listen to birds chirp from the furthest corners in all directions. If he closed his eyes the sounds would filter through him at intervals. One set of chirps to his right, behind him followed by another to his left in front. They would seem to be traveling
inside
him and the sounds always made his ears warm.

To his right was the trunk of the oak tree which extended into the sky and became a bulb of contored arms that towered over the white-stucco bungalow. It could be seen from blocks away. He discovered again the low, thick bough where a tire used to hang from a length of stiff, weathered rope and he re-witnessed the limb where Oliverthecrow would always perch before jumping into the sky again. The dark feathers on the back of the bird’s neck used to shine in moonlight—

“Trying to memorize it?” Malin was leaning close to him with the interior of her shoulder resting against his and her voice was soft. Her nose and cheeks stood out in pink from the cold. He felt warm breath on his ear lobe.
And there was lavender and rain from her hair.
But he didn’t answer.

She said that everyone makes the mistake, when they want to memorize something—commit it to eternal memory—of staring at it for hours and endless hours. “Try blinking backwards,” she said, “Take a short, less-than-a-second glimpse of what you want to hold onto. Then shut your eyes tight. In the blackness you’ll see it clearer than if you stared at it for a year.

“Practicing psychologists use that. Helps the patient to see.”

“Oh, so now I
am
a patient of yours?”

“I would never call you
patient
.”

Zeb threw back his head and laughed. Sometimes, speaking to Malin made him feel like he was lying in the shallow side of an especially deep pool.

<> <> <>

Dad traded in his sedan for a coupe last year. Zeb wondered if maybe, after a while, staring at those numbers for years and years, they finally made it clear when the end would come. Not so much that they spelled out the date and time when you were going to breathe your last, but perhaps there came a sighing whisper on the computer monitor or on a ream of printed reports that said,
Hey, time is growing short. Time for the Last Hoorah. Time for the last Goodbye March
—
pay up and get out.

A ridiculously powerful creature, the coupe was a silver and black BMW 330Ci, one Zeb had only driven a few times. He had gotten his driver’s permit on a somewhat older one, a used Beemer sedan, an eighty-one or eighty-two—he couldn’t remember which.

The only design flaw in the long, somewhat sprawling Vaughan bungalow was the inclusion of a small, attached garage. It appeared to have been added later, not part of the original construction, something that always irked Oliver. It was limited in size by the property boundary to the west and as such, it was just barely wide enough for a vehicle at all.

In that tiny garage was squeezed only the new coupe and Oliver’s pet project, his 1983 BMW R65 motorcycle. He had bought the bulk of it from a salvage yard, then added to it over the years, scrap by scrap, mostly taking it out and annoying the neighbors with it in the driveway on hot weekend afternoons in the summertime. The throttle was the only issue left to fix. Oliver had said he would get the touchiness of it solved, then shine up the bike good as new before finally driving it in the September Charity Classic parade. In the narrow space between the front of the car and the door which led to the back yard, the bike sat under a grease-stained drop cloth, faded brown, dappled with flecks of paint from when Oliver re-did the bathroom a few years before.

Oliver kept his tools, two big red and silver kits full of them, in the basement, on the unfinished half where the washer and dryer were. It was also the only space he allowed Zeb to paint and all his canvases, stacks and stacks of them, helped to fill up the room. He kept all the shovels, rakes, and every other gardening tool out in the shed, simply because there was no room in the small garage. The doors of the coupe didn’t even have an arm’s length to open wide. The passenger door would gently rest against the foot of the three wooden stairs that ran up to the house door inside, and Oliver always made Zeb get out before he pulled the car inside the garage and closed the two shutter-style wooden doors manually. His fear of having a small flake of paint coming off the edge of the door onto the wooden step was nearly obsessive.

As a result, the car always sat a little closer to the east wall, the one it shared with the house where the little steps were. The coupe’s driver door could nearly swing out all the way.

The chill of the air in the garage caught them both when Sebastion opened its door and snapped on the light—a bare bulb which sat in the center of the empty rafters above. Malin’s eyes widened again. She commented on the beauty of the car, and Zeb agreed that Dad was a fanatic, a
nut
he said, about his Beemer. Before she went to move her rental car out of the driveway so the
Ci
could be backed out, he offered for her to hop into the passenger side of the coupe and get a feel for it—this would almost be her last chance to do so, he said. He was selling it. And the bike.