Free Thalo Blue by Jason McIntyre

his bare toes. Certain kinds of bass, especially in rap songs and hip-hop, made things go white for split seconds. With each bomb-studded beat his vision would deliver a corresponding throb of blinding white, as though everything and everyone had suddenly been the unknowing victim of nuclear holocaust. The skin of his scalp, too, would feel like flames where licking it and he would want to run his hands through his hair vigorously to try and ease the discomfort—and convince himself the flames were not really melting his skin there. It’s not that he didn’t like the music. He liked all music, was actually obsessed with it for the most part, but the inescapable rules of his condition made some of it uncomfortable.
    Inside the crowded innards of the Leland summer cottage, and straining through blurred white-out sight and the burning sensation under his hairline, Zeb could barely think, let alone keep up his end of witty conversation. Dave Matthews’ beautiful strumming on Satellite had abruptly ended partway through its second verse and Shane Jose had commandeered the stereo, spinning a set of ‘essential’ hard core house discs retrieved from the changer in the trunk of his Mustang. As the house music boomed, blasts of simple non-color assaulted Zeb. Everyone got drunker and drunker and the movement of the room with its accentuating throbs of blinding white, matched the empty intensity and emptiness of the music.
    And besides that, when certain kinds of fabrics brushed against his skin, particularly the red scar tissue of his right arm, he heard what sounded like thousands of voices all at once, a cacophony of sprinkled babble. They were whispering and it made Zeb feel like there were people in his mind, crowding him. That was more than a little upsetting; he hadn’t had a drop, but he felt like he was suddenly drunk on the new and overwhelming information which streamed from every angle of the house. Zeb left the living room with an exhale of relief and headed for a cement pad by the beachfront, where only a few scattered partygoers wandered. It was more serene, not twenty miles from the house, but far enough.
    As he walked to the edge of the property, he thought he could hear other music, not Dave Matthews but something different. He could have sworn someone was playing Neil Young’s Helpless . It wasn’t in direct competition with the wail and pounce of the rap music in the main house, but from somewhere out there, in the middle of the night, came that distinct and haunting harmonica melody. A party at another cottage? Some middle-agers re-living their teenage years? Hearing it then and there, above the bass throbs from the Leland living room, made no sense...yet it felt unmistakable. Even so, its woeful harmonica left him in an instant. It was gone, and he became sure then that he had just made it up.
    He stood there at the lot’s generous rim, having lost Jackson somewhere in the calamity of the night, and he took his breath. The moon was nearly full, and its light reflected on the water of the lake. The sound the ripples made was a loosening cadence, a waltz of unknown instruments that he would never be able to reproduce for any one else. It reminded him of another lake, a few years earlier, where he would stare at the water and up at a saucer full of milk that was the moon. Charlemagne Lake that had been, his mother and dad’s summer cottage, and it had sounded like this on every mild night.
    The memory of that let him stop worrying that there weren’t others around—no one was there at Charlemagne Lake then and no one need be here with him now. Briefly, he wished for his father’s camera to record what he saw, a picture to accompany the tune in his head, and one that maybe his mother would have liked. But that desire too, he decided, should be ignored. I can enjoy it myself , he thought. Let them have their throbbing bass, their cans of pop mixed with who knew what, the stuff from the Leland’s stash,