THALO BLUE #009

III. Disquiet Philosophy

When Zeb was thirteen, he started seeing his Aunt Sicily quite regularly.  That year Oliver the crow continued to make appearances every night at the window, Zeb brought a friend home after school for the first time, and Oliver, his father, began making it abundantly clear that the nick name, the one his mother had given him, should be outgrown.

Jackson Cavanaugh, in the same grade as Zeb, was the son of Dick and Frances Cavanaugh who had made a small fortune with a wholesale company that sold imported cheeses.  They lived in a giant house in Vaughan’s more northerly crooks and bends and when Jackson referred to them—Zeb thought this the neatest—he never called them mom and dad.  Instead, to him, and thusly to the rest of the boys at school, they became The King and The Queen of Cheese.  “The Queen went to her bridge game last night with the ladies from the auxiliary club, came home drunk on sherry, and The King had a fit on her, then proceeded to slap her upside the head till she cried.”  Jackson seemed to understand money, that having a lot of it didn’t fix people’s problems, sometimes even amplified them.  And Zeb liked that understanding.  It was a perception about things beyond most people’s awareness, a separation from most people, and a realization that we are divided from the things in our lives.  Jackson didn’t seem to inherit the stuck up attitude of the King and Queen of Cheese, nor of the other kids at St. Vincent’s, the private school which he attended.  And Zeb found himself naturally more pleased with his friend’s greater earthiness.  Well, Jackson wasn’t earthy.  But he was as earthy as could be found in that little world.

THALO BLUE #008

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Back to little Vaughan they went, all three, Zeb oblivious, Sadie contented, and Oliver happy as the proverbial bowl of spiked punch.  As they drove on Yonge Street that day, the foliage in Vaughan wore vibrant green; the spring had been not damp, but moist.  Luxurious and wet, but mixed with heat in the afternoons, like something was being extra kind to the shrubs and flowers, letting them flourish rather than subsist.  On the cusp of the city of Toronto, surrounded, engulfed by it, the municipality of Vaughan, still at less than thirty thousand residents back then, was but a suburb of a metropolis, a drop of water in a dry saucer, but the presence of skyscrapers and hotels and apartment complexes were not a pressing force on its outskirts.  It was like a vivid comfortable town where no town should exist, with its own sky and its own dignity.  In the midst of such a place were large houses and fancy cars and upstanding citizens who all seemed to profit from something—or have parents who profited from something.  It was a place that sat squat and with keen self-image inside the bustle and rustle of the money and movement of its large commercial and industrial centerpiece.

THALO BLUE #007

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That night when Sadie and Oliver lay in bed, she reading, and he going over papers from work, Sadie brought up the topic of Sebastion’s drawing.  She told Oliver about Sebastion’s insistence that his name be spelled with a Z instead of an S.  “He doesn’t like the S,” she said.  “And he got especially picky about it.”  She showed the drawing to Oliver who removed his reading glasses quickly and said, strikingly, “Is he dumb?”

“No he’s not dumb,” she snapped back at him. “My sister did the same thing when she was little.  She insisted to mom that her name wasn’t Sicily, that the colors weren’t right.  She went on an on about it, and would never say her name...she would get upset about it to the point of tears, actually.  Mom let it go for the longest time, but it got worse and worse.  I think it started to scare her, so she took Sissy to specialists and they had a little trouble telling her what it was.  But she most certainly was not dumb.”

Almost an inaudible mumble, under his breath and directed at no one, Oliver said, “Why are women always so goddamned unreasonable?”—and then a little louder, directly at his wife—“Specialists?  For God’s sake, Sadie, how much is this going to cost?”

THALO BLUE #006

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Sebastion, to this day, has a set of three distinct images which he can call to mind with perfect clearness, as though they were still photos taken with Oliver’s SLR camera, ones that he could hold in his hands and stare at.  These snapshots, all from his early childhood, those years between three and nine when it seemed his father’s displeasure for him began—though there are countless other snapshots with varying degrees of lesser quality—stand out to him as particularly significant.  They are the clearest in his mind, and at times, he has to convince himself that they are not real, not actually happening to him at that precise moment.  They are that vivid.

In order of their occurrence, the first such flashcard is of his head held down by a large white mitten while descending into a long gray tunnel.  The second is a kitchen table covered in crayon markings—blue letters, z mostly, which he always pronounced zee, and his father always corrected him, zed.  Combined with that memory is a long and curving line of red, starting to blister and bubble along the length of his inner forearm.  The pain of it and the picture in his head of crayon markings on the kitchen table, come to him with pinprick lucidity, and they bring back the physical pain of that moment with utter perfection.  He swears, when he sees that table and those crayon smears, that he can feel the unbearable itchy burning sting under the skin of his arm.

The last memory, the least clear and most perplexing of the set, is a vision of water beyond the black steel bars of a gate that stands closed before him.  Looking beyond, Sebastion sees, frozen forever in his mind’s eye, a boat kicking up white furls of wake and moving towards the farthest edge of the water’s body.  A man stands on the back deck of the craft facing him, his arm raised, his expression flat and empty.