Thalo Blue Page 4

  He looked up at her, his eyes wide and quite content, “That’s me, mommy,” he said, proud of himself, pointing to the blue head on the sheet of paper. “And that’s my name.”

  “That’s beautiful.” She paused, then pointed at the sloppy, backwards S, possibly the letter Z, on the third line. “Honey, what’s this here?”

  “This one’s blue. Blue’s better,” He said.

  “And this?” she said, moving her finger up to the orange S above it.

  “I don’t like that one...”

  “How come?”

  Sebastion paused for a moment, as if to consider the question. “It’s a bad color, Mommy.” Then he added, “Blue’s better.” He pointed to the sloppy word, Zeb, and his finger hovered there, tense. “My name’s this one,” he almost yelled. His brow was furrowed and she was startled. She had never seen Sebastion even once with a short temper.

  “Okay Hon—”

  The soup started to boil over on the stove and she abruptly left him there to go and lift its lid. Too late, it had dribbled down the side of the pot to the range and onto the blue gas flames. The smell of burned tomato soup filled the kitchen. And the dining room.

  <><><>

  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?”

  <><><>

  Sebastion heard his dad call him Seb once. Just once.

  Goodnight Seb, Oliver had said one night as he switched off the light in his boy’s back corner bedroom. Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite. And though he would not remember, not for years, not ever, it had actually been Oliver who christened his son with that little nick name. But Sadie caught the silent heat for it. She had been there when it came to real fruition, and it had been her sister who had the same weird affliction with her given name. Soon after scribbling his new moniker on the writing tablet at the kitchen table, Sebastion grabbed hold of it and started saying it all the time. What seemed to irk Oliver the most was that when Sebastion repeated it, he pronounced it Zeb, not Seb. His mom would ask him to put a toy away—“Seb, clean up for dinner”—and he would insist, “I’m Zeb. Mommy, I’m Zeb.”

  Oliver, still quietly bothered by the name they had chosen for their son anyway, tried to assume this would be one of those toddler things easily left behind in later childhood—like a comfort blanket or a sucked thumb.

  Sadie, as with everything, felt a cruel knob of worry in the back of her throat whenever that zed sound buzzed from her little boy’s mouth. She didn’t know if her son had a hearing problem or a speech impediment, but she wondered why it always came out like that, Zeb, and not Seb. Granted, it rolled off the tongue easier than Seb and, besides that, she supposed that a new mother, especially a young mother—she was only twenty-one when Sebastion had been born—would tend to over-analyze and worry about things with her first-born. He had all his little fingers and toes, and he was starting to say his alphabet now, so she decided she was lucky; all the big things were fine. It was time to relax a little. And as they made preparations to have their son looked at by psych experts at three colleges across the continent, the nick name even caught on. Though Oliver never did, not once, Sadie called him Zeb more and more often. And soon she just let it go entirely.

  The condition which Zeb would eventually be diagnosed with was uncommon. Research into it was sparse but the psychology community was beginning to gain some foothold of familiarity, to find some common language with which to speak about it. And when doctors at various institutes got wind of little Sebastion Redfield and his curious symptoms, especially at such an early age, they quickly offered free flights and hotel accommodations if he would come out and be tested by their teams.

  Oliver made one appointment in Boston, one at UC Berkley in California, and one at home at the York Institute, deciding the need for three such visits was excruciatingly adequate. He believed in a thorough approach to all things, but more than three appointments would be a waste of time. He didn’t attend either of the two studies out of town because of work, but sent his son and his wife alone on a plane to spend a few weeks in each place.

  In Boston, Sebastion’s recollections are sparse. At Berkley he remembers even less. But what he does remember from one of those trips, which trip specifically he still can’t recall, has stayed with him in such detail that he can still close his eyes and see every inch of it.

  There were nice men all dressed in light green, head to toe. They even had green caps over their hair and each of them was doing something different, pushing buttons or moving a piece of equipment around the big white room with windows to other big white rooms. Green was one of his favorite colors and the green men were nice to him so he smiled a little even though they were all strangers. But the other men, the ones in the long white coats, they weren’t so nice; they made Sebastion lie down on a cold metal tray and then they slid him into a large gray tunnel, a gigantic humming machine, after they strapped his head down with what looked and felt like a big white fluffy mitten. He wanted to reach up and feel the mitten because sometimes soft things made him see blue, and blue was always his favorite. But his hands were strapped down with fuzzy things too so he couldn’t move at all. It was a terrible feeling, what those men in the white coats had done, and he squirmed and cried until he heard his mother’s voice above the humming of the tunnel.

  He had settled some during the ordeal—his mother had talked to him from the speaker the whole time—but afterwards, when the buzzing and clicking of the machine had finished and he came out again, he was still sniffling and there were tears welling in his eyes. That image of the gray tunnel and the white mitten never left him. Nor did the thought that he couldn’t reach up and touch it if he wanted. That, and the men in the long white coats talking quietly to each other, was the sort of thing he always associated with being different.

  After a final series of long days, repetitive tests and questionnaires had ended, Sebastion was exhausted and finally taken home. Sadie and Oliver returned to the York Institute to see the lead doctor and were standing close together in the middle of a long stretch of sanitized hallway when he arrived. The corridor was brightly lit by overhead fluorescents that made the doctor, with his long white coat and pale skin, almost disappear against the walls and doorways around and behind him. The other two colleges had delivered the same news and this overconfident doctor, hauntingly blase in his look—except for a black shock of hair above his eyebrows—confirmed the same thing: Sebastion had something called Synaesthesia. Essentially there was no danger at all to Sebastion, to Zeb, as a result of his condition. No pills he had to take, no treatments to endure. He would not die earlier than his mom, and would never need to learn how to inject himself with a needle. “Many synaesthetes,” the doctor told mother and dad, “experience what some would call an involuntary joining of real information from one sense to a perception in another sense. In addition to being involuntary, this additional pe
rception is regarded by the synaesthete as real, often outside the body, instead of imagined in the mind's eye. It also has some other interesting features that clearly separate it from artistic fancy—”

  This particular White Coat, the zealot from York, found his throat-clearing and hallway-voice monologue cut short. What would have only become a self-indulgent and lengthy diatribe was flatly interrupted when Oliver raised his hand at the words, artistic fancy. Oliver had noted that the doctors, all of them, not just this one, seemed far more impressed with the condition itself than with its affects on his son.

  “So... is he... stupid?” Oliver asked this lead White Coat.

  “No, no, heavens, no,” said the doctor. “Quite the contrary. Actually, Sebastion has tested rather high on IQ measurements. If anything your son is the exact opposite of that. He is above the board in several respects. I believe that with all the other added information in his brain, he sometimes just takes a little longer to process things. But, in conjunction with that above-level intelligence is this—” and now a glare from Oliver— “...other thing...” Oliver heard the doctor’s tone as if it where unrefined sugar—simple, unaccountable nonchalance—and he wanted to treat such nonchalance with the same disdain as he might an underling at his firm. Maybe one who had just misappropriated a hundred and seventy thousand dollars of client money. He did what he always did with such an underling: he made him fear for his job, or if he was in a particularly foul mood, maybe for his personal safety. And he did so with only a glare and a tone.

  “Go on,” said Oliver.

  The doctor cleared his throat again and continued. “Synaesthesia. We don’t know everything about it yet. That is, uhm, as a community—in the whole of science and the study of all brain afflictions, that is. This one, synaesthesia, its reality and vividness are what make it so interesting in its —uh— violation of conventional perception.” Now Oliver was staring fixedly at the doctor, making him obviously nervous. “I-it’s truly extraordinary. It’s also fascinating because logically such an occurence should not be a product of the human brain, where the evolutionary trend has been for increasing separation of sensory function anatomically.”

  Right. Okay. Oliver wanted to say this was all nonsense, but caught Sadie’s look and so he remained at least civil. “So what exactly does this mean to him? To us?”

  “Well, nothing. Really. Uh, Sebastion will continue to see things in a different manner than most little boys. His brain combines the perceived information of several senses in a truly unique and special way. He might see one thing and interpret it completely different than you or I would, completely different than everyone else who looks at the exact same thing. Basically, one sensory perception will trigger a completely unrelated one. For example, what you’re seeing with his understanding of letters...His alphabet is largely different than yours. His exists in a set of colors. A is a shade of green, and B is a shade of mauve for him and when he sees these letters it will trigger in him the sight of these colors. Whether the letters themselves will be that color, or whether everything in his line of vision suddenly becomes that color is unclear. It’s a little different for every Synaesthete. It is possible that the color exists in his mind, as a flash, or a sheet overlaying something else entirely—a shape perhaps—a sound or even a tactile response... a tingle or a brush against his lower spine. But whatever the sensation, these colors, the sounds, all of it is extremely real to him. And you should make every attempt to not let him feel that it is wrong or different... or stupid... to see things this way.”

  <><><>

  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.

  Two cities, two blooms of colour, one little, the other large, both festooned and sprawling into and around the other, encircling, encircled, a ritual overgrowth of moss, dense on the tree trunk where it is allowed to thrive, and help the other thrive. Helping these two entities to amass their unity was not a border drawn in the sand, but an elongated handshake: Yonge Street. A crawling artery itself, a panting vein that throbs like a thick living string from top to toe. Top: the eventual reaches of conjoined suburbia that gradually spread north to rural Ontario. Toe: the steel and glass towers of downtown’s ego and, beyond that, Lake Ontario’s wet lips.

  Oliver was pleased about the news of Sebastion’s intelligence. Sadie too, but less so. She was happier about her son’s special gift, God’s Gift, she would call it several times in the next few years. She tried her best, as she had done when Sicily’s less intense form of the condition had been diagnosed, to imagine the world through her son’s eyes and ears. He had been slow to answer questions, true. He had even been slow to walk, to talk, and to form sentences. But now she looked at it in light of this new information: synaesthesia. Like the doctor said, perhaps it just took him a little longer to process all this information. She closed her eyes at night and imagined that the world from inside Zeb’s brain was a swirling landscape of colors and sounds. It was a circus kaleidoscope where the band never stopped playing and he walked through it each and every day of his life. Perhaps he had to sometimes sort out what was real and what wasn’t. Perhaps that would eventually become difficult for him. Perhaps it was reason to worry.

  <><><>

  In a group of boys Zeb would have always been the one at the rear, tagging along, looking back or around to see what the others were missing. If they giggled and shouted, he peered at traffic. If they leaped and whooped, he stared at treetops.

  He loved to draw. From the moment he discovered his new moniker—the one which made his mother worry that things would be difficult for him—he was always drawing pictures. All manner of visuals sprang from his imagination and his masterpieces hung in the office, the downstairs den, and on the white-faced refrigerator droning alongside the gas stove. Each of them had a dazzling array of color: blues, greens, purples, reds and pinks. And they all had a set of three letters in the bottom corner: Zeb. The Z was always blue. The e was always green and the b was always purple. Sebastion hummed tunes while he drew. Some of them repeated themselves, but some were completely new each and every time he sat down to draw. Sadie never recognized any of them from the radio or television.

  At five, he sat in the dining room half of the kitchen-dining split at the large oak table. It was a beautiful, thick, full-bodied table. Splendid and old, it had been Oliver’s grandmother’s who passed it to Rita before Oliver got it when Rita and Teddy’s estate had been divvied up. Oliver loved that table. It had been immaculately restored by his parents and his care for it, as with everything, went well beyond average. It always had two tablecloths on it, a padded one with cotton on the interior and vinyl on the exterior to protect the delicate finish, and a cloth one over that which could be changed to reflect the season or a specific decorum that Sadie had in mind.

  On this day, though, Sadie had both cloths off the table. It sat uncharacteristically naked while the two covers, the padded one with the vinyl face, and this season’s white and blue stripy, hun
g on the line outside. They both flapped vigorously in the stiff spring breeze, against a backdrop of the oak tree’s lowest bough, sprouting with dots of vibrant green.

  She had set two hand-knit wool placemats under Zeb’s drawings, but as she disappeared into the back office to open some of the week’s mail, he decided that the softness of the wool beneath his sheet of paper made it hard for the crayons to really press down properly. So he pulled the problem-causing placemats out from under his drawing and threw them promptly on the floor.

  It was when he finished his drawing that the real issue began. In front of him was a beautiful picture of a pristine lake surrounded by trees, far more like the lake and trees of an older boy’s drawing, where the lake had waters of different shades and the trees had implied leaves from scribbles that seemed to separate and become countless individuals. As usual, Zeb picked up his electric blue crayon to begin signing his name, something his father had taught him. “All great artists sign their work.”

  The crayon slipped on the smooth surface of the bare table, and its waxy coating went clean off the edge of the paper. It smudged a dark and shiny line, thickly down to the edge of the table near Zeb’s tummy where it stopped. He looked at it and immediately fell in love with the sheen of it. It caught the light far differently than the crayon did when it was on a plain sheet of white paper. It was brilliant; a new shade of blue had been invented and Zeb was giddy. Fifteen years later, he would be sitting in a psychology seminar at university and would answer a series of questions during a student presentation. One question, about his favorite color, garnered sniggers from the girls, and thus contempt from the boys. The answer that made them laugh was, “My favorite color is indigo blue crayon smeared on my father’s oak table in the dining half of our kitchen. He’d tell you that was his least favorite color.”