Thalo Blue (29 page)

“
Sebastion
,” she said, “What you need, I hope it finds you.”

As Sebastion descended from the attic apartment and heard the squeak in the staircase’s middle step for the last time, he thought he could see Old Mrs. Morgan looking out at him through a pane in the kitchen window. In a flash, she was gone, if she had ever been there in the window at all. But, he supposed, real or imagined, it was her turn to smile.

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Friends and lovers speak in tongues. They use a language that no one else knows, one that they have invented for themselves only. It’s a secret handshake that either lives forever...or dies, carried off when one of its creators leaves for good.

Jackson took his and Zeb’s to New York City.

And Sebastion climbed down a set of metal stairs, walked atop a patch of velvet grass and past a dwindling garden of dark weeds and overgrowth, with his and Caeli’s.

Everyone walks their final goodbye march with nothing left to say. Somewhere there was a white mitten with one last unread note stuffed inside it—most likely a snippet of Cummings. Finally laundered, fluffy and expectant, the mitten waited to be found. But neither Caeli nor Sebastion would ever remember where it went. Or how it got there.

How now, brown cow?

III. Counterfeit Life

Atrophy of the body, atrophy of the mind. Malin arrived on Thursday to find Zeb fallen out of his bed, his pastel green sheets twisted around his waist and trailing from his legs back up to the mattress. He lay on the cold white tile of the floor in his open-backed gown, propped up at his arms on the wooden guest chair which sat in the middle of the room. He was looking up at the door when she came in. His face was red and wet with tear-streaks down his cheeks. He was wailing, crying and sputtering, seemingly oblivious to her presence at the doorway.

She didn’t know this was coming, not this exactly. But she had recognized that a realization, an
epiphany
of some magnitude, was imminent. Yesterday, after she had come in and seen the light smile on his face, after she had heard the song he was singing, she understood, subtly, that an overwhelming ordeal was coming.

Part of her was glad it was ending, or at least beginning, but she still felt its crushing weight more acutely than she thought she should. She was surprised at her self. Seeing him there, like this, made her want to get right down there on the floor and bawl with him. Here was this man, young and on his way back to full health, a man with so much to live for, yanked from his bed to his hospital room floor by tears.
By tears.

His brain had pushed out some details. Some big ones. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It came in all shapes and sizes and she had seen it before, despite her relatively young age and inexperience. The human body is easily manipulated, easily tricked and fooled into thinking everything is just fine, Clementine. Even the body itself can cover its own pain signals, to ignore hurt and stress. The body can do what it wants, she knew, and would do so in a snap if that made things easier. Healing was crucial, and part of healing was forgetting. How could he sing songs forever? How could he even sing a song once? Her self-inflicted removal from the situation was gone. In her midriff, a stone fell to the bottom of her stomach, threatening to punch through its lining. She felt pity. As little as she wanted to, she felt pity for Sebastion Redfield and she wanted to help him.

She went to him, crouched, and put her warm hands around his shoulders, squeezing them until he realized she was there. The morning light was dimly streaming through a gap in the curtains at the window and it fell across both of them.

Still caught in his bawling, he finally looked up at her, his eyes red and swollen. His voice was cracked and hoarse, stifled by intermittent sobs and his wracked, aching lungs.

“
They’re not coming, are they? No one’s coming.
”

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The days and nights of Jewels Fairweather were empty, devoid of any loved ones and any real connection to the world. He had two goldfish—one a Broadtail Moor of considerable size, the other a smaller sparsely decorated Calico Veil Tail. They swam in silence—all except for the sleight motorized whir of a filter and an oxygen blower—in a plexi-glass tank by the living room window of his apartment. Solomon and Jude, they were called.

Alongside scarcely anything else, there was also a large screen television facing a black leather chair. Most evenings, if his shift ended before supper time, he would eat a meal alone at the counter or standing at the stove, or even over the sink. It would generally be grilled fish or broiled chicken with vegetables spooned out of the pot they had been cooked in, a baked potato, and juice or milk chugged from the carton then put back in the refrigerator. He would rinse his dishes and then go to the living room to watch a movie. He had several stacks of DVD movies and another stack of older VHS videocassettes, among them director’s cuts of his favorite films from the last fifteen years.

There were no lovers in his life, no friends except co-workers, no childhood chums that he had managed to hang on to. Despite his impressive physique and his good looks, despite his ability to carry a conversation well and speak about things that mattered, his world was primarily his own, not shared with anyone.

His last sexual encounter, not including moments on the floor of his bathroom by himself, tears streaming his cheeks, had been with a dark-haired woman, about thirty, thirty-five, who called herself, simply,
Dalyce
. She had been reluctant to give out her full name because, she said, “I do these dating service things a lot, and I don’t want a buncha strange men all being able to find out where I live. It’s Dalyce.
Just
Dalyce.”

In his mind, or
minds
, The Thief could see everything he wanted, everything he needed to, but the top details, the most recent ones, or the most pervasive, were easier to grab. Anything further down was more difficult to immediately access unless it wanted to be found. Going down there required a lot of vigor.

The fact that Jewels’ only real friend was his partner, Marlon Smithee, made everything a whole lot easier. That was because Smithee was dead. And even Smithee didn’t know much; the two of them only hung out a handful of times. They would go for a drink after a shift, though Fairweather never had anything stronger than a Coke with ice. Jewels’ supervisor, his other co-workers, nobody, knew anything more than the bare essentials. He was a living phantom. He went home after work and stayed there until it was time to ‘feed the machine’ or hit the gym or go back to work.

And he worked out a great deal, even had some equipment in the second bedroom of his apartment that he used when he didn’t feel like going out into the world. When the Thief looked into a long mirror in that room he saw an impressive man looking back at him. The only thing he needed, as he saw it, was some color in his skin. That and the desire to approach people, and he would have any woman he wanted—
if
that’s what he wanted.

The apartment was meticulously neat; Thief had expected this orderliness when he first flashed through the mind of the man he had now become. But at the moment, only days after his release from North York General Hospital, the living room was a mess of boxes, empty cans, wrappers and dirty dishes. It stank of mingled foods and sauces, coffee and even tobacco. There were empty beer bottles lying on the carpet in stains that likely would never come out and the Thief sat silently in the mess, slouched in the leather chair with the blinds closed.

That was the issue with all of this: when he took someone down there to his icy precipice it wasn’t just his memories that would become property of the Thief. Their emotions would be his too.

And right now, he found himself in a constant vise of sadness, squeezing him tight. The anguish made him feel like this Katie was
his
, like she had died that morning. Not eleven years earlier. He, like the true Jewels Fairweather had done, was mourning for the loss of a girl called Katie Becks.

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More than an issue, it was a real bitch of the situation. This wasn’t like Willem Nash’s diabetes—shots of insulin and a wife that watched his diet for him would compensate for that kind of crack in the vessel. But the interiors, the thoughts,
those
were not as easily managed. With every one he took, he consumed every part of them, every morsel, every contemplation, every vice, every desire, every feeling and every inadequacy. He could quell the little ones and push them away, but dire ones, large ones that were all-encompassing—he could do nothing with those. He needed for them to either pass, or he needed to learn a way around them.

Pieces of this life and that life, one from years ago, and one from today, all vied for a place at the front of the line. Each had a resounding timbre and they fed off of one other, a sick family of symbiotes or a support group for the eternally disfunctional. The Thief found that when one set of memories came fizzing to the surface, bits of others would inevitably come on its tailwind, looking for their slice of the attention. He wished he could ignore the lot of them but that was impossible and the never-ending onslaught exhausted his mind. He needed to just rest. He needed to eat—this body was a big one, used to working out five times a week and then succumbing to a voracious appetite—and he needed to figure out his feelings for this girl. Pictures of her bleeding to death on the sidewalk were everywhere. They were imagined, but real enough for him. They were stuck with magnets on the refrigerator or swimming on the reflection in his television’s blank picture tube. And they were carried on the leaves of fake plastic plants as bubbles of air pushed them about inside the fish tank where Jude and Solomon endlessly roamed.

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He had two cracked ribs and his right arm was broken. It was in a cast and around his chest, a tightly-wrapped gauze constricted his breathing, not allowing him to inhale or exhale too deeply, lest a stiletto of pain would seize him up and down. His face was a mess of still-forming scab and there were swollen bumps under his scalp. On his right leg, in addition to bruises and scrapes, there was a set of metal brace plates in a consortium to hold his leg straight at the knee. Its small pins had no give and pushed uncomfortably against the cartilage of his knee cap so he couldn’t even bend the damn thing.

After being revived then spilling in and out of a Katie-filled unconsciousness for a half day or more, he had spent four subsequent days in hospital with no visitors except his immediate supervisor and two strangers. Supes brought a card signed by everyone at the EMS Station where he worked and a staffer from the York Region’s Emergency Medical Service arrived some time later—it was standard procedure, she told him, to send in an official after an on-the-job accident such as his. His last visitor, after Supes and the staffer, was a psychologist—one from Houston whom he was certain he remembered from before. But through his pain and these new and overpowering visions of Katie, he didn’t give the Houston shrink much thought at all.

Four times, the light of morning drew close and then retreated to allow the darkness of night to take its place. And on a fifth day, when the sun was at its crest in the winter sky, and with the blessings of his doctor, he checked himself out of the hospital with nothing in hand but a stack of prescription slips and some metal tubes of ointment. He had been cautioned, had been given instructions about when to change his dressings, what positions to sleep in so as to better heal his ribs, and when to return to have his cast removed. His supervisor had assured him that his pay would be intact and he signed Conrad Julius Fairweather’s name on some documents to ensure he would get the appropriate injury compensation while he was off duty for recuperation. Physiotherapy was scheduled to begin in another week.

The Thief had some time now.

Had bought and paid for it.

He was to make a full recovery. Just a minor set of scrapes and bruises, Dr. Rutherford might have said. In other words, he was lucky to be alive. Anyone might have told him that. After his resuscitation, Jewels Fairweather—his successor, actually—was nearly as good as new. Back from the dead. Even after an epinephrine syringe had been forced into his chest, even after it had induced a heart seizure, even after he had tumbled and flipped inside the ambulance, he was alive again. And very soon he would be as strong as an ox once more.

Lucky to be alive.

Right. He sure as hell didn’t
feel
lucky.

The psychologist from Houston was all but forgotten. Nearly all he cared about was that the buzz in his head had dissipated. It had been the worst at that wicked moment just before the derringer exploded his bottom jaw and then again in the back of the ambulance as he swelled back to the world and attacked his savior with a needle. Those memories were hazy now, since his homecoming, not nearly as pronounced as those of Katie, whom he had never even met. The buzzing, he knew, was only there at the closing stages, was only a product—maybe a signal—that a body’s physical abilities were at an end. Its life was drained, the buzz said with screeching voice, and his only time left would be borrowed from another.

Lucky to be alive
—was that even
close
to true?

His sons were gone, the wife too. Though, none of them had ever really been his for staking claim. Just the same, he missed them and knew that he could never go back. By now the boys would have been interviewed by police. They would not have any answers to give because they would not know anything, would
never
know anything, would grow up never understanding what had made their father run off and shoot the man at the confectionary that morning. He wondered what that knowledge would do to them. Just as he used to sit in Nash’s big leatherette chair and wonder what those golden-haired boys were dreaming about, he sat in Jewels’ real leather chair now and wondered what sorts of men they would become. When their mother called him a drunk and a mad man who murdered an immigrant over a can of orange soda pop, would that haunt them? Lucky or not, it would haunt
him
. He knew that much.