Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “I don’t like it when you use that voice,” she says lowly.

  It’s just us two in the ward. I nod, acknowledging it has always been so, even if strictly speaking it hasn’t.

  “This is going to be hard,” I tell her. “I am so sorry.”

  “What is it?” she snaps. “Just fucking say it.”

  So much like me.

  “I’m not your father, Tessa.”

  “What? Are you talking some –”

  “I said I need you to listen to me and I really need you to listen to me.”

  “Please explain. You’re freaking me out, dad.”

  “I’m really sorry, darlin’,” I say to her, the words what I think should be my true signature line the kids hear when they pull my action figure’s rip-chord.

  “If you’re not my father, who are you?”

  “I’m in the wrong version of this world,” I tell her. “It only just made sense. I came here a year or so ago to kill Seagal and didn’t even notice the difference as the little things started stacking up and not making sense and then I just thought I was losing my memories to Cusp.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” she yells at me and starts to cry all over again.

  “I didn’t leave your mother, honey. She left me. I think she was fucking that lawyer for months before I even noticed. Earthsong? That was the big one. In my world that woman went by the name of Titanium Girl and –”

  “But Titanium Girl is –”

  “I know, I know,” I say to her in my best soothing voice even though I have already tested my theorem over and over again unconsciously the past few days without even knowing it. There is no counter-argument left to be made with any validity and I don’t know if that makes me mad or glad.

  “It’s all messed up. Some things get scrambled between the parallels,” I say to her. “Little things get changed. Copied. I don’t understand it all. It has something to do with key moments or archetypes or facts or . . . I dunno. I think Simon Magus once tried to explain it all to me and it was all a few miles over my head.”

  “If you’re not my father, where is he?” Tessa asks blearily.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I have an idea though.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know yet. I need to wait for Seeker and –”

  “She’s here. She’s been waiting to see you. Shade died. Don’t you get that?”

  The grieving girl starts again and I rest one hand on her shoulder and a length of her chestnut curls tickles my hairy wrist and I feel the dislocation of the weeks and months stacking up on me like centuries and there is no pill for this sorrow but to live through it and get to the other side. Windsong acknowledges my touch and now we each know that intimacy of father-daughter has been sundered forever.

  “You think he’s dead, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you care about Shade and the others? Or don’t you care because you know your people are safe in the world where you left them?”

  “Honey, I don’t have any such assurances,” I say and I say it almost angrily and the gulf between us grows imperceptibly wider as I do not have to explain to her that if what I am saying to her is true, I may have a whole universe to mourn if I can’t find my way back.

  “Will you take me with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you . . . know. The truth. If you know where he might be?”

  I nod, relieved she is not asking to quit this world for mine. I realize in this moment, through the palette of my own senses, how curious and self-interested and casually homicidal we are as a species in our thoughts and feelings as people. Already I can feel the conceptual membranes hardening between us, the widening boundaries, the shift in interpersonal dynamics and their accompanying physiological and biochemical realities. I will grieve for this girl when I am gone just as I grieve in one corner of my heart for Shade, gone in this universe to her early grave. And yet the underlying tenor of my concerns dye the very fabric of this reality with the sound and smell and flavor of my awareness that whatever bonds Sting and his cohorts placed on Ras Algethi when he escaped from the prison of Jocelyn’s corpse, here in this parallel, another of his fingers remains free to wriggle and worry at the very cohesion of that selfsame fabric of reality. And like those others of distant stars, now I know he is conterminous with himself across all our worlds.

  Tessa sputters and lies down sobbing beside me and I rise from my ease on the edge of her cot to see Seeker in the doorway with a radiant look of such joy I can barely bear to lift my eyes from Tessa’s supine misery, and that frozenness alone is enough for Loren’s optimism to be stilled.

  “Joe, what is it?”

  And not waiting for my answer, the viral armor that was barely a presence swarms across her hospital scrubs producing various mysterious apparatuses which scan my way across too many spectrums to count.

  “Hi Loren, it’s nice to see you,” I say seemingly without feeling. “I need you to confirm something for me.”

  “What?”

  “My vibrational frequency. I’m not native to this –?”

  “No,” Loren finishes for me, scan completed in the moment it took for her to think about it. “You’re . . . an alien to this parallel.”

  Seeker looks at me aghast and Tessa redoubles her efforts to merge as one with the pillow she hugs to her bawling face. I feel like being sick amid a weird giddy laughter I thank Christ I don’t express as these two women mourn or slowly come to understand that I only entered their lives so seamlessly because of some greater design.

  Zephyr 23.9 (Coda)

  I CAN ONLY hope – if I can find a way back – that these events may have unfolded differently or perhaps never, but thinking about those sorts of things sends me back on an only half-unraveled puzzle, because it means Sting and Lennon and Afghanistan and so many other things were all simply mirror images of the world I left behind when the Crimson Cowl played me for a fool.

  I spent weeks here with Matrioshka playing Arsenal’s corpse as a puppet before letting the illusion slide, and after that little falling out I got tied up in Twilight’s insane (and insanely hot) sorceress cousin’s drug war and a revivified Loren in the process. After that, it was one small step into the disaster which was Afghanistan, and from thence to here, these long days spent trying to save a city which had already taken a mortal wound, like Arthur laying at the end of Borman’s Excalibur, defeated by his own dark seed.

  The Crimson Cowl escaped with his life and won my exile in the same fell move sending me willingly to track Arsenal to his sanctuary, here, without ever disclosing I would be leaving home and hearth behind. And what that meant for Arsenal, it is hard to tell, post-mortem. I’m guessing this was his home parallel which he used as a base to track down his enemies in other timelines as well, or something, but who really knows?

  I’ve got no idea where Seagal got his gear, though once ideational tech and jumping through parallel universes is factored into the equation, we are in dizzying territory anyway because trans-parallel pollution of the timeline includes the possibility of trans-parallel pollination: the constant flow of polluting signifiers from one universe to another becoming a sort of perpetual motion machine, erasing and eliding the ordinary laws of cause and effect in such a beautiful way I almost feel like some of that rarefied air from outside my body still plagues my insights with the deep connections I see in this at a structural level through the lives of ordinary men and women for whom the mysteries of this ongoing cycle of birth, commerce and decay has long since lost its propulsive enthusiasm, and yet it seems hard to fathom how we are caught in the grip of the stranglehold that was commenced for us in our past history and whose originary effects also curtail and shape any possible future we might have, manifesting as a society like some spectacular and yet inedible fruit produced by a demented gardener through sadism and careful pruning.

  But I digress. I only have two days of bed rest u
nder my belt in a deficit of sleep and care for the self that could fill whole mortal lifetimes. Yet it is enough to lend me the strength to settle this final piece of the puzzle into its place.

  The Hilfiger mansion wasn’t spared in the destruction wrought on this parallel’s version of my native Atlantic City. With Windsong insistent on coming with me and yet too weak to fly courtesy of the two bullet holes in her wing, we ride in one of the FBI’s commissioned dual-wing choppers, though I have to preserve some dignity and leap from the open doors once we are over the site.

  This world’s carbon copy of my daughter yells something at me about the need to wait, but father knows best. Loren follows my example and coerces gravity or how it is understood by plastic reality and in short order we are outside and then through the manor’s front doors, ready for anything except the sad fact this place appears picked clean by the hordes of looters who have come and gone during recent weeks.

  “Some crime scene,” Loren says.

  The air is frosty between us. She knows I plan on leaving her and everyone else to return to my plane of origin. I don’t think that’s an unfair request. And yet the vibe I’m getting from some of the female company in my life is that however grief-stricken they are on a cognitive level knowing their version of me is likely dead, at a limbic level I’m here in his place and their base yearning for that continuum to be respected above the wishes of a harsher multiverse is understandable if not irrational.

  I yearn to sit somewhere quiet and well-lit and drink coffee and read a book and yeah, maybe get my dick sucked. Is that too much to ask? If the universe had a voice, and I suspect it does, its answers are in the world all around me.

  The Feebs confirmed my suspicion that my copy here, native to this parallel, never phoned in a murder at Hilfiger’s mansion and they didn’t know squat about the billionaire industrialist’s carefully assembled lair. Seeker follows me through the mansion’s remains like we are two tourists lost in a museum dedicated to capturing this traumatic period in Atlantic City’s history. This is all new to Loren. Matrioshka is the only Being who accompanied me to this parallel, and my suspicions are confirmed with the banister which hid Hilfiger’s private lair and the true museum on this site remains undetected.

  “He came here,” I say as we stop before a grand sweep of stairs ascending to the higher levels.

  “Zephyr?”

  I nod, briefly unable to reply as I ponder the rich cocktail of emotions contemplating my own parallel’s extinction.

  I can hear Windsong yelling somewhere distantly. Loren sizes me up.

  “How does it feel?”

  “Strange,” I say. “Good? I dunno. I don’t understand why Ras Algethi didn’t come after me after – hopefully – finishing off . . . Matrioshka.”

  “You’re willing to name a star-god, but you’re worried ‘bout saying hers?”

  I catch myself in the ironic laugh and narrowly avoid plunging direct into despair. Loren only gives me a feline smirk and her suit starts scanning the big staircase beyond us.

  “You’re not such a unique snowflake after all,” she says.

  “The Hilfiger of this parallel wrote letters,” I say. “So many things are the same, but just enough are different that I think that –”

  “– there should be a secret mechanism right here.”

  Loren moves and depresses the tile near the lavish stairs’ undercroft and a soft doorway snickers into existence, triggering nothing more malign than the tinkling of long-dormant fluoro lights flickering on.

  Hilfiger’s lair is a mess. The displays and glass shelves are shattered, artefacts of The Twelve’s alternate timelines crushed underfoot, a retro-looking motorcycle likewise battle-scarred, partly covered in a torn victory parade banner from a day never experienced on this world.

  Hilfiger’s corpse stares out at me from where he died, hurled into another long glass display case back-lit by alien newspaper pages in skewiff frames. Bacteria and the room’s hermetic controls have taken care of the worst of the decay. Blood lacquers the wooden floorboards and the shattered glass around him, the shards reaching almost into the middle of the museum dungeon where a blackened figure lies in the mark of Zorro this failed version of me emulated throughout his life.

  I approach my corpse hesitantly, the body recognizable by a pair of motorcycle boots and not much else. A sick conviction fills me that if I lift my gaze to its grinning skull, I will only further secure my doom. My eyes focus on the middle distance as I crouch over my dead double, my fingertips sifting the ashes as I look back to Hilfiger slumped backwards over the glass, and there is a gust of wind that dusts my fingers as Windsong flies into the room and alights as pale as the ghosts which crowd this room. I can only give an inchoate shudder and kneel with my palms on my thighs and try not to gag as the smell of ancient barbecue fills my nose and I squint at the dead industrialist in the display case and wonder, if it was Arsenal who incinerated my clone, why wasn’t my assassin surprised to see me alive that final time?

  ***

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  Zephyr continues in Zephyr VII

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