Thalo Blue (32 page)

Outside the polished doors of the elevator, pressed by ties and skirts all around, he crashed against a stainless steel ashtray and scattered the dust of dead cigarettes across his face and hands, and all down his suit coat. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, he thought, as the color ran away, as the blood dropped out of his head like thick syrop.

When hee came conscious his face was strapped under an oxygen mask. He was sitting on a stretcher in his lobby among a small crowd of watchers, looking up at Sebastion, while someone was blathering on and on about Sadie.

“
I saw your mother. I saw your mother
,” the voice was saying over and over. He was looking around to see who was talking, but then realized his son was trying to calm
him
down. That made him grasp that the voice he was hearing was his own, and he promptly turned silent.

After similar blackouts he fell nine more times over the next five weeks. And each time, he was lucky enough to have his fall caught by something—or someone—so the worst it generally got was a bloody forehead and a few bruises on his cheeks. Once, though, the seventh fall, he came to with a stinging gash across his neck. He had fallen against and down on the sharp edge of the refrigerator door handle in the coffee room at the end of the hall from his office.

With that one, there had been oozing blood and it smelled of copper in his nostrils. He finally brought himself to make an appointment to see the doctor.

Oliver had his own trip down the long gray tunnel, his own ordeal with the buzzing and clicking, the cool metal tray and the fuzzy white mitten on his forehead. A second and third opinion, a CT scan of his brain, and an MRI all confirmed the same thing: grade IV astrocytoma. An end-stage tumor that was eating away at the rest of his time. A cool and collected thief crawling around inside his head and taking what he wanted. This diagnosis suggested a short life of endless suffering, of daily injections, and of painful treatments. And, in the end, his normal life would be over.

In late March, when there was still marginal snow in the gutters and on lawns, and after it became clear that the drugs his father was administered could only lessen the seizures and not contain the advancement of his condition, Sebastion took Oliver to Outlook Bay Regional Cancer Center. He was checked in and he would stay there, getting scheduled biopsies and spinal fluid drainings, a regular diet of needles, and, eventually, a full-out and evasive stereotactic craniotomy—the removal of a section of scalp and the withdrawal of a large piece of the tumor.

By June, it was decided that the craniotomy had done little for the short term, and nothing for the long term. An extreme portion of the malignant mass was still alive and continuing to grow, stretching like a spider from his occipital lobe to his temporal and possibly beyond that. Oliver Redfield was dying. And he refused traditional radiation treatment, chemotherapy and the installation of a brain shunt, without discussion. By that point and, as a result of his lack of further treatment, he was fighting headaches, clouded thoughts, greater blackouts and hysteric episodes that could last for hours. Sebastion was working only a handful of hours at the firm each week. Most of his time was spent at the center, bedside, battling tears and rages, and calling for nurses. The cocktail injection of Lamictal, Topiramate and Trileptal, to lessen the severity and frequency of the blackouts, was all that Oliver would allow, and even its potency seemed to diminish over time.

On June twenty-second, a Sunday, at the insistence of his father, Sebastion took Oliver home. Dad, as did his son, hated the hospital-smell. And he didn’t want to die in the clinic. The boy carried his father out of that hospital as doctors and nurses, yelling and fussing, faded away into the hallway-background. Their dire odors, their serious white coats and their authority were ignored.

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Sebastion had never bought a dress-shirt in his life. Not ever. For work, he only borrowed a set of the five most brightly colored shirts from his father’s closet, ones that Oliver admitted to never wearing. And then, sometime after Jackson left for NYU and he started full-time, he purchased about a dozen or so silk ties of the finest weave. He would intermingle the ties with each of the colorful shirts over the course of two weeks, trying not to wear the same shirt or the same tie two days in a row. In his life, there were two of his father’s statements which he could remember without falter:
An artist always signs his work
and
a fine tie makes the suit, makes the man
.

In a bizarre manner, remembering such things didn’t create outright despair for Sebastion. There was a registered sadness, yes, but the news of his father’s illness and all the impending tasks it created for him—horrible and contemptible for a son to have to do—built a grim removal. He approached it by replacing it. In his mind and somewhere down below, the gray dispirit for his job that he had learned to accept with submission was now the same wooden handle he pinned on this. There was empty attention for his dying dad. There were moments, little ones, but powerful and straining, when that was not the case. But, for the most part, he found such barrenness made it easier to hang on to. He skipped grief and went straight to acceptance.

They hired a nurse—Cordova, who turned out to be excellent—when Oliver, on one of his good days, insisted that Sebastion head back to work four days out of five. Sebastion, who remembered well watching Oliver loop his tie before jetting off in the Beemer to work in the mornings, now stood—perhaps as a peace offering—by the mirror in Oliver’s room to tie
his
each morning. This was usually just as his dad was waking up and, often, while he was still coherent for a portion of the day.
A fine tie makes the suit. Makes the man.

By the time July’s heat had fallen on the house, Sebastion, spurred by Cordova’s suggestion and his own sight of sweat standing out on his dad’s neck and forehead—and the stink of him—had moved the adjustable bed and all the equipment downstairs. Oliver, he knew, liked it down there better anyway. Before all of this, during his rare free moments, dad would either be out in the driveway trying to finish that noisy motorcycle of his or he would be down there where the turntable was. The stairs leading down below the ground seemed like a division-line. Upstairs was work and responsibility, beneath was the opposite. A place for living. Sebastion remembered his father spending his time down there on the few evenings or Sunday mornings when he wasn’t in the den, bent over reports and account balances or with his eyes glazed in front of the computer monitor.

One stagnant night that month, Sebastion sat much like his father used to: in the round halo of a lamp, obsessing over a pile of papers in front of him. The breeze blowing across his face from an open window in the kitchen-dining split was almost as hot as the air inside and provided him no relief from the closeness. Cordova had gone home at her customary time, and Oliver, peaceable at an almost unheard of stretch, had asked his son to put on one of his old records,
A Trick of the Tail
, by
Genesis.

Reverberating echoes of
Dance on a Volcano
and then
Entangled
wafted up the stairs like oil clinging to the surface of water, jostled and sloshing in the tug of a mad moon. And Sebastion—sitting at the dusty oak table which still looked golden-red and majestic—pored over the stacks of twenty year-old receipts in bewilderment. The bottom lines didn’t add up. It made sense, though, how all these years the coffers had been nearly dry. The mortgage was excessive—even for their modest bungalow. But the neighborhoods of Vaughan were pricy. Their home, the long flat rancher, was one of the smallest, oldest and least luxurious but it sat on a healthy-sized lot in a prime locale. It had cost a pretty penny. And sure, dad had spent money on new cars, had bought the house up near Edan on the lakefront, and had paid for private school and a full four years’ tuition at prestigious York University. But Sebastion always knew there had to be something else. Something chewing up his father’s cash. You don’t eventually make full partner at a financial firm the size, though small, of Whitman and Merridew without earning
something
.

He returned to the den and found another shoebox of receipts and envelopes. But they offered no clues. Then, finally, he remembered the safe hiding at the back of the closet. He opened it with the combination that Oliver had given him months before.
If I go crazy and can’t remember things
, he had said,
you might need this. It’s your mother’s birthday. Don’t suppose you remember it, do you?

In the safe, among papers and receipts and a couple of what looked like bearer bonds, there was a small white envelope containing a stack of checks—there must have been almost a hundred, some of them already yellowing. All were made out to Jonathan Merridew—

A mingled and throaty holler came, atop the drowning, disparaging notes of
Ripples
. And Sebastion nearly fell through the doorway of the den. His heart thudded and a rush of blood came to his face. He ran out into the hall and towards the stairs with the stack of checks in his fist. The triumphant part of the song came next—a part he felt he knew by heart—but he tore down the stairwell and turned the turntable’s volume down as he passed.

He approached the bed. Under a patchy, stitch-lined scalp of pink and tan, Oliver’s eyes were closed but he was sitting up facing the doorway. His fingers were twisted tangles, outstretched, as though gripped with pain. His incoherent howl had turned to spit-throwing wails. “
You ruined my table! Sebastion, you FUCKING brat! You wrecked it with your FUCKING crayons—wrecked it all, goddamn you! That was mom’s. And You made a goddamn mess of it!”

There was a colorless bile spitting out from his mouth in flecks. It bled from his lips, down his chin and onto his shirt. Like it had been for months, it was an off-white, nearly tan shade. Something despicable and putrid to look at. Sebastion grabbed the rag—one which he had gotten for Oliver when the bile had started coming quite often, one that he had to change more and more often in the last week—and began wiping at the mess while Oliver continued to yell and rant. His eyes were still closed and when the realization came to him that the music was gone he seemed to nearly snap out of it. His eyes came open and they focused on his son. The tears that had already begun on his red face now gushed and the volume of the words fell to nearly nothing. Sebastion sat down on the edge of the mattress. It shifted. And he put his arm around his dad, shushing him, easing his bother, wiping the puke from his shirt and his face. He was still talking; the words were blended with bile and spittle and his face was a tight grimace of hurt. “—
you wrecked it, Seb. You wrecked it all—fucked it all up...
”

When the sobs had eased, finally less jerky, Sebastion remembered the stack of checks now partially crumpled under him. After setting down the bile-rag he pulled them out and held them to his fathers eyes. “
What’re these dad?”
He shook the little bunch of papers in front of his father’s eyes, getting nearly angry.
“Do you see these? What are they?
”

Oliver tried to focus. His hand came up and rested against his son’s, trying to steady the shaking fan of bent, yellow papers and he really did look at them. He saw his own signature in the corner, then narrowed his eyes up at Merridew’s name, also in his own handwriting. He recognized the disheveled and fading slips. Each one of them.

He squinted and looked around. His eyes found Sebastion’s face and he said, quietly, without emotion, “
Extortion, m’boy
.”

“
Extortion? Extortion for what?
”

“Where’s the music? Somebody got rid of the music.” He was strained, panicky, looking blankly in the direction of the turntable spinning silently, but almost as though he couldn’t really see it there. He seemed ready to cry again. “
Where’s the music? Somebody got rid of the music...
”

“’S all right, dad. I’ll put the record back on.”

Sebastion got up from the bed, taking the stack of checks with him, and moved across the room to the turntable. His hand rested on the volume knob. “Goodnight, dad.
Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
”

There was no reply.

Oliver only lay back in his bed, his patchy head of hair and scars coming down gently on the pillows. The volume came back up and a crooked smile arrived on his lips. Above it, in his eyes, was a bare look, attentive to nothing.

Sebastion went to the stairs, snapped the switch and looked back again. A scrap of light from upstairs, behind him, fell downstairs, across his father’s face.

Los Endos
, the final song on the album, grew to fill the space.

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Sebastion got little sleep.

His brain and his vision felt like he had downed too much caffeine and though exhausted, could not relax his panting lungs and thumping heart. He lay there in his little room, the multicolored walls he had painted twelve or thirteen years before only visible in tones of gray, hidden by the haze of darkness. He stared at the window, he stared at a tree branch. Maybe his eyes wouldn’t close because of all the nights his father had woken him up with screams and sobs—he could never get back to sleep after that. Or perhaps, they stayed open because of those other nights, the horrifically long ones when no sounds came from downstairs, no matter how much he willed his father to make
some
noise. In those long stretches of time and darkness he worried that the light of morning finally
would
come, and that he would find Oliver there,
silent
.

The combo-punch of both scenarios made his days and nights mixed up. He fell into uncomfortable catnaps at his desk, saw no clients, and felt the obscuring fog of his life a little like one might remember a night of binge drinking which occurred several years before.