Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “I asked you to help me, not walk off like that,” Beth snaps, eyes on the back of our daughter’s unruly mop, not even acknowledging me.

  Like the kicked dog I sometimes was, I move in at once to lighten her load. Only then does she meet my eyes and gesture with her chin.

  “You have to talk some sense into her,” Beth says.

  “Me?” I look between them. “Honey, I don’t even know what’s going on.”

  “Jesus, Joe, there you go –”

  “Hold it,” I say, one hand raised and only now do I realize this bizarre counter-Earth has dressed me in jeans and a grimy white tee.

  Elisabeth gives me that death’s head look that she often did in the face of me being Mr Assertive. I hold my ground, hard as I find it after all this time, and her resolve slowly fades. I swivel back to Tessa, following her into the kitchen where I dump the groceries on the bench.

  At once the phone starts ringing. It’s an easy distraction to ignore if the Editors are trying to confuse me. I pick it up and hang up and on second thought pull the set from the wall and throw it past Beth following us from the living room.

  “Tess, I’d like it if you could start again and let me know if there’s a problem.”

  Somehow, Lennon’s claptrap monologue about there being “no problems in the Now” echoes through to me, and between this and a dozen other little nuggets of parenting wisdom I have super-glued together during my sixteen or maybe it is seventeen years as a parent, it feels like something solid to which I can lash myself to weather this ideational storm. At my resolve, it’s as if the air shifts in the simulation – like a ripple runs through furniture and walls and Elisabeth and my daughter, I fear rewriting their intentions and adding to the inherent difficulty in the face of my illusory prowess.

  Outside the kitchen window across a cityscape of rent-controlled tenements I spy the plume of an explosion. Moments later the soundwave carries to us amid a chittering of startled car alarms. I’m not sure what’s expected, but the weapon’s masters clearly don’t know me that well. I turn my back and fold my arms looking intently at my daughter, more than willing to ignore the odd calamity for such a more immediate emergency. I literally can’t be everywhere and I made my peace with that in my twenties.

  “She stole a car,” Beth says while Tessa’s still contemplating her reply.

  There’s a look of desperation on my wife’s face. I resist the urge to snap, bug-eyed as I might be, the shock of the news momentarily exorcising my clarity that none of this is actually real, however terribly real the test itself might be. I narrow my brows, trying to strike the right balance between concerned, incensed, and willing to let Tessa make her case before she’s executed in the court of parental opinion.

  “I didn’t steal it,” she says with all the truculence her faux fifteen years can muster. “Astrid and I borrowed it from her brother and her brother agreed.”

  “Who was driving?” I ask.

  “Joe, it doesn’t matter which of them were driving. . . .” Beth starts.

  I turn to bodily confront her, raising both palms and looking away as I shake my head. Against my better judgement, I gently take Beth by the arm, which I manage after the third try

  “Baby, we can talk about this as parents later, but right now I need to talk about this one-on-one with Tessa, because this is all too much for me at once,” I say.

  “This is just like you,” Beth growls. “You favor her –”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I don’t agree.”

  “We have to hold her accountable this time, Joe. We can’t keep letting her run loose like this,” Beth says.

  I nod. “You might be right,” I tell her. “Just for now though I need a minute with Tessa alone. You can have the same when I’m finished. Deal?”

  Like a grandmaster’s chess move, I steer Beth into the living room and urge her in the direction of the bedroom it took us the first six months to work out smelled so bad because of rats nesting in the internal wall. I hear her go ahead and start smashing shit in there, her enraged yelling only partly coherent, but I move back to the kitchen refusing to be drawn in, sternly inviting Tessa to continue through and out onto the shitty fire escape balcony where I used to smoke the odd cigarette when baby Tessa was having her day sleeps and mom was out looking for work instead of me.

  But clearly ignoring my wife’s threats still ongoing in the other room isn’t hard enough (and I figure saving my marriage isn’t the goal here, since the challenge needs to be at least remotely achievable), the program ups the ante immediately in the scene before me as a teary-eyed Tessa suddenly clasps the railing’s edge and clambers up, perilous with the city four storeys below.

  My eyes boggle at her even as I hear her mother caterwauling similar suicidal intentions from the other end of the apartment.

  “Tessa,” I say. “Get down. What are you doing?”

  “I can’t take this anymore,” she bawls.

  “What?”

  “Her.”

  “Really?”

  Tessa hesitates, thrown off by my genuinely puzzled tone.

  I look around as if no longer actually registering her presence, looking for her invisible masters instead.

  “You’re going to have my daughter throw herself off the roof just to win?”

  I shake my head, no longer acknowledging Tessa’s doppelganger as I muse aloud to the elements, chagrin the dominant flavor as I put my fists on my hips and my fake daughter remains paused at the railing’s edge like a glitch in the program.

  “I guess you can do this, you know, keep shifting the variables if you want to win,” I say, trusting if this thing is complex enough to generate its own user interface from my unconscious that it can tap into what I’m saying.

  “Go ahead and jump, honey,” I say to Tessa. “If you want to end your life because your mom’s an insufferable pain in the ass and you’d rather be dead, I’ve got some bad news for you.”

  “Wh-what is it?” Tessa says.

  And with a loving snicker, I give her a push.

  “You can fly.”

  *

  IT’S NOT SUICIDE, but the moment I’m rebirthed through the cataract I’m aware of the forces rushing at me, the moment of my disappearance seemingly unnoticed as I fend off Disastro, leaping and twisting to deliver a kick that might be savage if it wasn’t literally right into his armored butt.

  In my fist is the grip of the crystalline sword I am now permitted to withdraw by my bodily momentum as I sag at the end of my zenith, the whole glittering array of the crystalline nexus folding into the weapon as I fall back to earth, purplish light akin to my expectations as the technology manifests according to the dictates of my unconscious, the blade as broad as my two palms, a deadly sheaf of living light that trails glowing chromatic baubles of its essence as I drop, Rakshasa, Killjoy and then Disastro vectoring in to triple-team me at the moment of my fall from grace.

  So it’s not like it’s deliberate so much as intuitive as I swing the weightless blade and drive the point directly into the broken concrete beneath me, landing in a crouch as the sword immediately shatters and obliterates us in its expelled power, the incandescent whiteness, the unholy tearing of the veils between us and whatever ghastly non-Euclidian reality lurks outside the demesne of the Real – of Lennon’s Now, of all those awkward fumbling moments of humanity drowning in its own stink that we mostly recall fondly unless we’re one of those perpetual gloomy types who basically flunked the Briggs-Meyer test.

  The cataclysm happens too fast and too soon for any of my foes to even register my harebrained and reckless course of action. And perhaps it’s the hangover from my recent dreamscape escape, but the treacly flow of time lingers just long enough for me to think about the events which led me here, and I throw that hope out to the cosmos, just willing it to be with every fiber of my being as yes, perhaps I regret my too rash actions as images of my daughter and ex-wife, so recently relived, flit through my overwhelmed sensorium.


  And then the god-almighty flash ends, taking us with it.

  Zephyr 19.11 “At The Appointed Moment”

  IT SEEMS MY wishes have an area effect. The light recedes as fast as it appeared, and a feeling like waking up from hibernation crawls through me, like my gizzards need to be unpacked and spread out to thaw in the sun, me laid out flat on the untrammeled concrete with the strange void of the ideational tech hanging over me like a black sun within the mammoth cave.

  To my regret I see Disastro, Killjoy and Rakshasa also groaning and moaning their ways back to consciousness, the cat-lady the first of them to get up, but even from my supine position I Taser her ass pretty good and she slumps, giving me the breathing space to rise on one elbow, hand clutching my wounded side now invisible beneath the self-repaired still-suit.

  “Wh-what happened?” I hear egg-head Disastro say.

  “Time travel,” I answer.

  Killjoy stands. The black metal point of his blade slithers across the polished surface and he methodically cuts a large X in it, glowering at me or at least I am pretty certain he is, despite the black-and-red mask completely covering his face.

  “You guys don’t want to do this,” I tell them weakly, at least for the moment far too rogered to be able to defend myself if they decide it’s going to be a gangbang.

  “Oh yeah, and why’s that?” Disastro says, Killjoy being the quiet one you’d normally find in the kitchen at parties.

  “Future-me just levelled the mountain,” I say hoarsely. “I’m not sure, but past experience tells me we’ve got about five, maybe ten minutes at the most before I turn up and shit gets real.”

  “Real?”

  Disastro stares at me like a punch drunk dime store robber, not looking too clever for a guy with powered armor. Clearly not the inventor. I nod, motioning to the vorpal space above our heads.

  “That little plosion we just went through was me setting the alien tech to self-destruct, taking out the mountain and frankly fuck-knows what else. Got it?”

  “Shit, we better scram.”

  “Good advice.”

  Disastro looks to the enigmatic Killjoy and simply lurches away, headed for the main exit. The silent villain stares at me a moment, God knows what mental processes going on behind that inscrutable façade of his. A moment before I open my mouth to speak – knowing I am fated to be elsewhere at this point or soon hereafter – the villain surprises me by tenderly scooping up the unconscious Rakshasa and legging it from the chamber.

  I nod, pleased, and slam as fast as I dare down the nearest side hall, nearly colliding with the same trio’s just-minutes-younger versions of themselves sneaking up the other way, drawn perhaps by the ruckus or maybe even the sound of their own voices.

  *

  AS I SAID, I slam through the porcelain tunnel network like I’m in a kid’s video game on meth, hard lefts and rights, feet sometimes skidding on the floor or palms pushing off walls as I redirect almost faster’n I can think, no puns now, jostling past startled masks who I yell at incoherently to evacuate the complex. Most are already spooked by the noises coming from deeper within the cells, and like Nietzsche’s madman swinging his lantern, I delve deeper going exactly the opposite way to where anyone sane might now be headed.

  Still, entering the periphery of the apocalyptic scene – chunks of kraken, ankle-deep water, psionic radiance, wrestling light bodies, and extra-dimensional parasite-infested super beings going crazy with the kung fu action – even I am taken aback a moment as my boggled eyes settle on my own calamity, the insect-possessed Shade choking me out on the sewer-like floor yards distant.

  I stalk forward, no immediate sense of hurry despite my purpose, foolishly beholden to the idea that closing the loop is a form of predetermination, which of course it ain’t. That said, I arrive all the same at the appointed moment, sending an electrical blast into St George from behind, then striding up and grabbing Shade by the ‘fro.

  “Need a hand, handsome?” I all but laugh.

  Honestly, the look on this fucker’s face is priceless. It somehow doesn’t matter a whit that it’s me, nor that it was me all but a handful of minutes ago. Yes, I remember everything about my gallant, handsome and some might say pugnacious grin, but as I wrest Shade off myself (or “off of” as some of you might say, to my eternal shudder) and cast her from the pit of my own mutual admiration, if ever there was someone who was going to feel a moment’s sympathy for the poor bastard lying on his back, half-caked in kraken splooge, then it’s going to be me. The only pity is there’s no one here to repeat the favor for yours truly.

  Shade squawks and I backhand her more savagely than I might wish and less than she deserves, then I offer the minutes-younger version of me a hand up, nudging my doppelganger as if to tell him to lighten up and appreciate the existential hilarity of the moment, however much existential terror in the face of the absurd might be the appropriate response. If Camus could see us now, I don’t know if he’d shit his pants or simply decide suicide was perhaps not such an elegiac way out after all.

  “Relax, slim,” I say. “I’m you from about twenty minutes from now. You need to skedaddle.”

  “What . . . the . . . fuck?” he stammers.

  “Don’t think, dude,” I tell him. “I’ll evacuate the mountain top. You have to hit the ideational weapon in the yoga chamber. Got it?”

  “Shit, that’s what it is?”

  “This isn’t really time for a two-man soliloquy.”

  “But how do you know?” he asks like we’re playing out some cosmic script (I don’t need to mention here that of course we are, right?).

  I motion to where Matrioshka and Lennon’s illuminated forms writhe in their psychic duel, unmoved by the cacophony of grunts and shrieks as the others battle it out.

  “She tells you in a few minutes,” I say. “Now go.”

  “OK.”

  And the good little bastard does exactly that.

  *

  HARD TO BELIEVE, but I am reluctant to leave my erstwhile nemesis to do my dirty work. I stare with what innocent bystanders might mistake as longing in the direction of the non-corporeal light show, frankly not sure I could even tell the two apparitions apart.

  With my prequel gone, time is of the essence, knowing the ideational technology will blow in the next few minutes, but now that I find myself inside this conundrum, the reality of abandoning Twilight and Cusp – and for that matter, Shade, George Harrison and any other misfortunate enough to still be inside when the curtain comes crashing down – overwhelms any other judgement. I should be gone, out the door, gathering those who I can in the precious seconds left. Instead, I hunch my shoulders and turn back to the action.

  There’s nothing I can do about Lennon and Matrioshka, and frankly I’m not sure I should even if I could. But I note Lennon’s host, the no-longer-so-smugly-grinning Sting, who staggers to his feet clutching his head, a double-barreled blood nose only adding to the pathos as bloodshot eyes find mine and he manages to stammer, “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Synchronicity,” I say and shrug and lay down electrical suppressing fire that lets Twilight and Cusp put St George down for the count, but Shade and Whisperer aren’t going so easily and I move closer to Sting and check that the poor prick can even see straight.

  “We have to get out of here,” I tell him.

  “Where’s here?”

  “Afghanistan.”

  Now he really looks put out, sounding more like a grumpy dad from a British sit-com than the cool, calm and collected super-dude and all-round dispenser of trite pseudo-Zen philosophy I’ve come to know and loathe.

  “How the fucking hell did I get to Afghanistan?”

  “Doesn’t matter. If you don’t want to be buried here, give me a hand.”

  Sting begrudgingly nods and rounds on the battle scene, and for the first time I understand we have at least a gnat’s chance of taking the upper hand now I have another world-class psychic on my team. I don’t know wha
t he does at this point, I just know the hairs on my arms get boners and the remaining G’th’kargh collapse writhing in agony on the floor, freeing the others from servitude.

  “Who are the alien intelligences?” Sting asks. “I can’t see them, but I can sense them.”

  “That doesn’t matter either,” I say. “We need to book.”

  “Book?”

  “Stop asking fucking questions and let’s get out of here.”

  So saying, I grab him by the arm and propel him back the way I arrived, grabbing a barely semi-conscious St George and throwing him into a fireman’s lift, surprised at how little there really is of the old guy. Weary beyond belief, the other liberated heroes stagger together after me as I push off the floor and lead the way flying through the underground complex.

  Zephyr 19.12 (Coda)

  IT’S A TRUE movie moment. We hustle out through the legs of the giant Buddhas serenely overlooking the harlequin-colored chaos of the forecourts, scores of superhumans and their kin ranging about in confusion looking for answers, the vicious Chinese whispers of the crowd only driving them into a frothing frenzy until we pour out, me with the esteemed St George over my shoulder, Cusp helping Sting to walk, Twilight and Whisperer staggering together, Shade looking like death warmed up as we move down the slope, calling to the others to get further away, the Afghan locals knowing something’s up, craning suspicious eyes our way as they exit shopfronts and feel the Devil on the breeze and start making themselves scarce as if by silent agreement.

  The thunderclap comes a moment later. I’ve herded the bulk of our brethren ahead of me and stop at the mouth of the street running down from the huge trampled muddy entrance to the retreat, a slight frown as I wonder if that’s it – and true to form, the white horror of the moment explodes in my face as Armageddon grips the hillside and everything simply vanishes. Trapped inside the white noise generator, I hold onto Harrison for dear life, flexing every ounce of super-strength I possess to remain upright as shrapnel, debris, and various other flying pieces of crap smack into me, nearly taking out my legs as I move blind through the explosive blizzard. Finally I press into other huddled forms and crouch, the earth itself roaring its disbelief as we remain blinded by the hurricane of destruction and bunker down in the lee of the shops along the east side as something big and hard and not friendly crashes into the back of my head and away and it’s only being down amid the press of other people that stops me tipping over. As eventually the riot quietens, I hear and feel St George stirring, bewildered as one might expect any man of his age to be to find oneself awake in the middle of what feels like the end of the world.