Authors: Jason McIntyre
She said that it finally drove that patient insane.
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For months after the people at Hospice took Oliver’s remains away, after the equipment had been removed from the basement next to the turntable, after the rented bed and the used up bile rags were gone, after the funeral arrangements were made, after the outward end of it had come and gone, Sebastion sat in near silence. He was not bedridden, but he rarely left its crumpled sheets. There was an unamenable exhaustion in him but he could not feel it when his eyes were closed or when the television roared. There was a void not experienced, so much as it was sensed from a remote plank of observation. Depth of field was a distant cousin you didn’t make plans to see any more.
In those emptied spots, those
nulls
, though, that’s when the trouble came. In those little dead pieces of blank volume and black tube, the less-than-a-second blip after a commercial break and before the program renewed with its pre-recorded laugh track, that’s when he heard the whisper.
During all those days and nights, as the snow fell and the black asphalt and the brown lawn found itself shrouded, there in a rollover, as the mattress squeaked and the lungs took a breath, it lived as well—a skinny exhale:
but he was dying anyway
.
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“You never said anything about my father.”
Sebastion looked vaguely at Malin.
“...Did you need me to?”
“Not necessarily. I thought you’d have a strong opinion about it. About
me
. Or an aversion.”
“I’ve seen some things in this world, Sebastion. Some pretty messed up things. You and your dad, what you told me, it’s ...it’s...something that probably shouldn’t have happened. I believe you can look at things one of two ways. Both start with this phrase:
People die.
One goes on to say that you can sit and dwell on the circumstance. The other says,
hey, keep breathing. Move forward
.”
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Sebastion wrote a short passage in his
Book of the Dead
that would have particularly irked his father, but he decided it was, actually, most fitting
for
his father—along with a number of other passages in that thick, self-indulgent volume.
That phrase was this: “
A ‘wake’ is what’s left behind; Funerals are for the living.
”
The weather turned cold after Oliver’s death and the only people who turned up on the chilly September afternoon of his funeral and burial were a few underlings from the firm, Walter Whitman’s wife, Riley Fischer and himself. Sebastion did not read a piece of obscure text or even a well-known one from the bible. It was the end, and like a fizzled firecracker with no pop left, it proceeded in that exact manner.
Fish, after the earth-turning, and the descent of the casket—more like a friend and less like a co-worker—approached Sebastion and told him that John Merridew, now the sole head functionary of Whitman & Merridew, would be considering Red’s re-instatement in the New Year—
in a somewhat reduced capacity
.
Sebastion guessed that the only reason for such an offer came by way of the firm’s legal arm. It was, sure as sun, made to guarantee that Sebastion would not, out of spite, liquidate his father’s third of the company’s holdings. That would put Whitman & Merridew in a somewhat precarious financial position.
Only the messenger in such a memorandum, Fish, solemn and quiet with none of his usual bemusing and giddy child play, delivered what was required of him and backed away through a cascade of silently falling snow. Sebastion would never see him again and would only speak to him once more, through the receiver of the gray and tan telephone of his Vaughan kitchen. Moments later that telephone would be smashed in resentful haste.
Sebastion did not envision bursting into any of the three floors that housed the firm of Whitman and Merridew to open fire with a semi-automatic weapon. That would have been more haste, ridiculous and insane haste. But he did have visions, not dreams per se, but visions—small silent clips that would replay in front of his eyes like those of Sicily, his dead aunt from long ago. In the visions some of the members of that firm
would
perish. The fluorescents above shoulders and heads poring over file folders and white sheets of paper first flicker. The CRT monitors with their black faces and scattered nonsensical white numbers burst like dark oily balloons filled with glitter and smoke. Then the floor-to-ceiling panes of almost invisibly tinted plexi-glass propel outwards in whole pieces. And from beyond them comes a great vacuum of wind, a negating suction of vast magnitude, as though, clear of the towers on King Street, a nuclear void from the heavens has been burst, first blowing outwards like an explosion then drawing inwards and pulling everything with it.
All the bodies in that space, all the horrible, horrible bodies find themselves twirling helplessly, violently, towards the gaping mouths left in the absence of those glass sheets. John Merridew is not the first to go. He is the last, fingers finally losing grip from a dividing baffle where he thinks, just for a brief second, that he may actually be able to hold on. Out, out and up.
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“What would you do, Sebastion, if you could do
anything
?”
Malin had changed the subject and then changed it again. Sebastion’s silence had grown pregnant and he realized he had been elsewhere entirely. Dragged there first by revelations of Oliver’s place in his memory, and then maybe by his own.
He finally looked Malin in her eyes for the first time in a number of minutes. He had discarded his anger and his hatred for Merridew, for that way of life. His temper had controlled him too many times but somehow, it felt like having been on that icy precipice with the stranger—
had that been the Druid?
—had bled away those emotions, had let them all float off into the sky. He didn’t want anything from such people as Merridew anymore; not to see them suffer, not to pay his wage, and not to approve or disapprove of his existence. But still, he thought, a slight smile fighting under the surface of his exterior, he would set the paperwork in motion to withdraw Oliver’s shares in the company and he would do so Monday morning. Come what may, he reflected.
Come what may.
“Well, I’ve put aside certain things,” he said then. “I suppose I would pick those up.” Then, dashing the ambiguity he had always used as a crutch—he knew that he did—he added, “I would paint, Malin. I’d paint—”
Then the floodgates opened.
“—I want to live in other places, study architecture,
paint
architecture. I want to stand on the Seine and eat a snow cone while I stare at the Opera House and Notre Dame.
Why not, right?
I’d sell everything, the house in Vaughan, the one at the lake, dad’s car, his motorbike. I’d leave it all behind. And I’d do that...
I’d paint.
”
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They left the cafeteria, wheeled back out into that hall in a comfortable silence. His anxiety appeared to leave him. Perhaps it was just because he was with Malin—she seemed to have it figured out. Knowing things, even if they were terrible things, somehow made a situation easier to deal with. And being with someone who had it figured out, or thought she did, was also worth a small celebration.
Her clicking heels, Zeb
, he told himself.
Remember those clicking heels of hers. They said she had things cased. Nailed down. And maybe she does.
For Sebastion there was still all so much to sink in. Malin’s theory of skipping stones. Namesakes in different cities all finding their ends at the hands of a crazy, cultish traveler. Sebastion didn’t necessarily believe everything she had said. Well, he believed her—
all of her facts
—he just didn’t know how her theories could be true.
Could they?
She didn’t tell him whether she thought Julius Fairweather, the EMT from earlier that night, the one who had nearly broken down in front of them, had actually been the Druid. But how she had handled it, her
tone
, made him suspect that she
did
think Fairweather had been a threat. At least there had been something about him that, as she said, gave her a bad feeling in the gut. Sebastion tried to remember how Fairweather’s eyes had looked, earlier, upstairs in his room. The stranger’s had looked through him. And the Thief’s eyes, nearly identical, had done the same. There was sadness in the anger—a deep sadness. Did Julius Fairweather look at him the same way? With further thought about the cold, snowy precipice he touched upon the insane notion that all her talk might have some reality in it. But he didn’t tell Malin what Fairweather had said to him, a detail that she had apparently missed. She wouldn’t need to know that. Not now.
“What did he say?” he asked her.
“Who?”
“The attacker—the guitar player—the one holding the knife to the family man at the restaurant in Massachusetts?”
As she wheeled him down the hall, back towards the elevator doors, she leaned forward again, this time letting her dark hair brush his ear and his cheek. He caught again that luxurious scent of lavender and rain and was transported to a corridor of gentle pink, like the soft insides of a spring rose petal.
“farawayfarawayfarawayFARAWAY,” she whispered in his ear, then unexpectedly popped the whining front wheels of the chair up in the air. The two of them did a careening, zigzagging pop-a-wheelie down the hall, nearly scraping the walls which, to Sebastion, were pillowy-pink and soft. They squealed like school kids, both of them. And they
laughed
, oh did they laugh! They laughed like the day after tomorrow would be just like any other.
Fairweather had called him
Zeb
.
VI. Moments of Clarity
Everything is relative; even truth is partial—depending on who’s telling it...and why. Even if honest truth is told carefully it dies a little in the exchange. And messing with its precision, just the tiniest bit, means other things might starve.
Getting into Malin’s rental car in the parking lot of North York General, Sebastion reached down to push aside a stack of CDs and cellophane wrapping that sat on the passenger seat. Among the discs were
A Trick of the Tail
from Genesis, Pearl Jam’s
Versus
, Elton John’s
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
and even
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
by the Beatles. He didn’t have a chance to realize what the rest were—a hand came by and snatched them from the seat before his fingers could touch them. He got in and pulled on his seat belt, then stared at her with a smile. Both of them were silent for a moment and only the small opaque clouds of their breath could be seen. She looked out the front window, past the condensation at its edges, and towards the crisp sky, empty and fragmented by jagged wintering trees. Was she blushing a little? Or was that just the color of cold in her cheeks, making them pink and vibrant? If it was blush it looked blatantly similar to the day not too many before when Sebastion had started serenading her and the officers from his hospital bed. Finally she looked at him with a sardonic smile of her own. And they both burst into luminous laughter.
When the mirth eased, she rubbed her hands together and, with a twinkle in her eye, turned the key and started the car. They pulled out of the parking stall and left the hospital’s lot, joining the traffic crawl on Sheppard Street. Though the streets had been cleared, she took corners gingerly, easing around them on the sheen of glittering white-brown muck a bit like a driver training student. Ten years out of Sweden, those same ten spent in Texas, and the snow seemed as foreign as moon dust to her. Be damned if she hadn’t gotten used to the heat haze and the sweat-inducing weight of her adopted southern U.S. climate.
Still not saying anything, she turned the volume knob on the disc player in the rental’s dash and the song that came up was
Getting Better
, the fourth track from the Sgt. Pepper album. His grin widened again. She, trying not see his smile and make her own laughter come back again, pulled the sleeves of her coat over her fingers to make gripping the cold wheel almost bearable. The heater blasted them both and she said, “Yeah, I know. Busted.” The tune ended; she ejected the disc and popped in another. Modest Musorgsky’s
Picture’s at an Exhibition
filled the car,
The Great Gate of Kiev
movement. Sebastion liked that part the best too. It was triumphant. And for Sebastion, the cascading strings near the middle, rising and falling, made long strands of midnight blue twist and writhe on the dappled windshield like so many dancers on a stage.
Malin turned onto Yonge Street. “Since we’re on the topic of me trying to figure you out,” she said, over the soft part of the piece where the clock chimes came, “I might as well tell you: I bought some new CDs. Never too late to build up my collection, right? Expand my musical horizons?”
Sebastion smiled again as
Kiev
rose once more.
“Oh, and I saw that painting of de Kooning’s on the net at my hotel last night.”
“
Yeah?
”
“Yeah, it was so vibrant. Explosive. Are your paintings anything like his?”
“...
Naw
. Not really. I use more color.”
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Be damned if we can’t get used to any ol’ thing, Zeb’s old neighbor, Mrs. Dalrimple, used to say. If ever Oliver would lean across the back hedge and mention the unusually cool spring weather or the extreme flux of winter temperatures, that’s just what she would reply with:
be damned if we can’t get used to any ol’ thing
.
Just like that. Just like saying that if we can manage, then, well, let’s just manage. Last year’s headline of a young pregnant woman, slayed and left for dead, draws gasps from readers. The newswire gets clogged, sending the story to printed rags and local news affiliates far and wide for readers and viewers that have, for the most part, never even heard of the creek bed where the pregnant woman’s corpse was found, where her unborn fetus was thrown to rest. But the story is brought up at dinner parties and in office coffee rooms, outside at cigarette breaks. Strangers latch on to it as a testament to the dying morals, the right-and-wrong decay of our modern world. The lapse of the civil in civilization. It’s disturbing, it makes the skin crawl. And yet, as Mrs. Dalrimple might attest, this year’s news story of another young woman, similarly filleted, similarly abused and similarly dumped in an atrocious manner, gets no press, not even a mention in the world events column.