I indicate the looming shopfront as we cross through the chaos. A megaphone somewhere suggests there’s a public rally on one of the cross streets. We’re not far from New Central Park, just a couple of blocks.
“You’re still up for this?” I asked with cocked thumb.
“I’m still waiting for you to tell me you’re going to do something about it,” Tessa says in the imperceptibly adult way she’s developed of late.
“About?”
“The Doomsday Man.”
“John Lennon?”
“Based on what gran said, I’m not sure we should say his name so much,” Tessa quite sensibly replies. “He might, you know, pick it up.”
“Fine,” I respond. “Code name Burger King activated.”
Tessa laughs.
“You want I should find him?”
“You’ve got two pretty good reasons,” she replies. “Either he’s a threat to our very existence or he’s, you know, your freaking dad.”
“Is that word back in again? Freaking?”
“It’s geek chic. Just roll with it.”
“Honey, you can flip a school bus. You don’t need geek chic.”
“Really?” Tessa replies, sounding so genuinely astonished I know for a fact she’s having me on. “My publicist was suggesting I get these little glasses. . . .”
“Publicist, huh?” I shake my head, a grim chuckle on my stubbled mug. “Having a stab at the old man? OK, fair enough. When Windsong starts becoming good for something other than movie premieres, you let me know. Maybe you’ll need a publicist then.”
“I think whoever said we have to use our powers for good was probably interrupted halfway through,” Tessa responds with a wry laugh. “I’m sure she meant a good time.”
I can smirk because for now I’m certain Windsong has a better path ahead of her than all that. When I started in the game, heroes were too aloof to be celebrities. We were more worried about maintaining secret identities. I’m not sure what happened to all that, despite a nagging suspicion that whatever happened, I was a direct contributor.
“You want me to investigate,” I say eventually.
We cross the sidewalk, waiting for a small knot of Koreans marveling at a busker playing bagpipes, the sound mercifully muted by the sharp wind, a little dog curled beside the man’s hat on the ground, shivering, the personification of misery.
“Funny,” I continue as we start moving again. “These last weeks I’ve been thinking I need to spend less time worrying about the big picture and try and resolve some kind of life for myself away from the mask and leathers.”
“Dad, come on. You have no life.”
“Well that’s what I’m saying,” I tell her.
“Hard for me to sympathize,” Tessa replies. “I know you’re being all parental and restrained and shit, watching me play the diva now I’m out and about. And I know you think I should be cautious about embracing that life, but really, you were my age once, or close to it. Have you forgotten just how awesome this is?”
“I’m reminded every time I see you,” I say, the daggy dad.
“I don’t think you even have a secret identity to protect any more, really, do you dad?” Tessa asks, injecting just the right cocktail of seriousness and sympathy.
“What, since your mother left me, you mean?”
Yeah, I sound bitter.
“Well, if that’s what’s happened. It’s not like anyone talks to me.”
“I’m talking.”
“Yeah. About yourself.”
“Well let’s change. . . .”
“No, no, thanks very much,” Tessa quickly intervenes. “Excuse my complaints. Please, let’s remain focused.”
She takes my elbow, negotiating us around a safety barrier encircling an open manhole cover.
“If you have one actual real friend outside your other life, you know, I bet you couldn’t name them,” she says.
My eyes widen a little, trying desperately to conjure someone. The Uzbekistani punk across from the flat who peddles my caffeine probably doesn’t count.
“Maybe that should be your mission,” she laughs. “Try to reconcile these two halves. Find a friend. Find your father.”
I’m about to make some smart-assed remark when all sound in the world suddenly vanishes, sucked up into a great bottleneck that then spits it rushing, smashing back around us. The view ahead wobbles and the front of the new Bloomingdales, just twenty yards ahead of us, disappears in a flash of bricks and white light and I cover my face with my arm as I try to grasp Tessa by the arm and fail.
*
THE FORCE OF the explosion knocks us sideways. I barely feel the various contusions as I slam into the side of a parked cab and it tips over and I drop over the other side as the taxi rolls on top of me with its windows and wheels shredded, the Iranian smoker inside now just a puree, a victim of death by flechette. When I drag myself from beneath the vehicle, the street enveloped in a moment of inexpressible calm, I see Tessa across the other side of the street with her back to a lamp post. She clutches her arm and looks around dazedly. Her coat and stockings are riddled with cuts far less serious than the debris around her should suggest. Or the bodies, for that matter. At least twenty former human beings lie in the street, looking for all the world like the god of the ants has had his revenge, people stamped, burst, torn open, their blood atomized across the ceiling like the decorative color spray of choice for this year’s most fashionable scenery.
I jog across and help Tess to her feet. One of her boots is missing. I prise back her fingers to inspect her arm and see a type of metal rod usually used to set cement in the foundation of buildings now sticking from her shredded jacket sleeve, an ooze of blood running down to her wrist and spattering the chalky ground.
“Are you okay?” I say, senseless, eyes wide with concern. “We need to get out of here. Try to help these people.”
As I speak I crane my neck. I can’t see anyone in a costume or astride some robotic death machine. Instead, policemen come running into the scene from the south, garbed in chalk dust, their faces set in grim and not entirely surprised expressions.
“Dad, I . . . my arm . . . there’s blood.”
“You’ll be OK,” I say and crouch to establish eye contact, more relieved than words can express when Tessa’s baby browns lock on mine and focus and clarity works its way to the fore.
“Honey, we’ve got to get out of here. I have to get out of here.”
“To do what, dad?”
It would be easy to treat the question as an aside. I look away, focusing on the image of a man staggering seemingly unhurt from the gaping maw where previously a building stood, peering hard at him like the answers might be writ upon his shirt. Instead, the picture resolves to the point where I can see he is walking blind, stumbling, razor gashes to his face and dark holes where his eyes used to be. He staggers into the arms of a helmeted policeman, one of the horse cops we passed before, and when he opens his mouth to moan, blood dribbles down the front of his dress shirt.
“What can Zephyr do here, dad, that you or I can’t?”
I wrest my gaze back to Tessa. With clarity comes a weird composure. She doesn’t look at me expectantly. Instead, I see a grandmotherly urge, the desire to impress some vital lesson upon me, a message well beyond her years and entirely like something one of my parents would produce in a moment like this. I can smell the dead and wounded, but I’m as captivated by Tessa’s face as if I were in the presence of the Dalai Lama or one of the Ancients of Mu or perhaps even Huey Lewis.
“I am just finding out who I am when I wear the mask, dad,” she says, “but I am worried you’ve forgotten who you are without it.”
It’s a bit much, I know, but the truth of her words is like the shrapnel wound I failed to receive. Abashed, any urgency to rush off and play dress-ups dissipates. The very real urgency of the situation coalesces around me and draws me in. A policeman with his hat off yells and clicks his fingers at me, asks, “You alrig
ht?” just to confirm I look like I might be able to help him. I nod and move over and together we lever a piece of retaining wall off a girl not much younger than my own, who by fate, genetics or the great mysterious computational abilities of the universe is able to withstand the Bloomingdales blast where this innocent flower-printed dress of a thing has succumbed.
Pieces of the girl peel away, severed by flying glass, as the cop and I try and move her into the recovery position. I am aware of the policeman sobbing, his hands sinking to the wrists in the dead girl’s wounds. I pull him free and open my mouth like I might say something useful, insightful even, anywhere near as wise as the childish wisdom just uttered to me – and before I can realize there’s nothing I can really say, the cop sinks into me, clutches my torn coat, dislodging pieces of glass from my scarf, not noticing I should be dead too as he cries with grief and horror.
Helplessly caught, I look across for my daughter and find she has moved on. I locate her later, arm tourniquet’d, helping a woman with two missing girls gather her wits sufficiently to file the report. By then the worst of the business is over and we can walk like it is another day among the ruins and not the one upon which such violence has freshly occurred. The news reports have identified Hebrew separatists as the bombers. It’s not a scene that belongs to my four-color universe, and standing there, my clothes daubed with grey dust and bloodstains turned to an oil-slick black ichor by the dirt, it seems Tessa was right. We were already dressed wearing what was needed for this day, or at the very least we had the colors right.
Zephyr 4.11 “Accept Into The Night”
LESS THAN THREE hours after returning from the department store bombing I am under the shower for the second time, scouring scalding water into my face and hair, trying to wash away the pain and embarrassment after another failed encounter with my determinedly soon-to-be ex-wife.
Life has certain parallels, you’d have to agree. We are born feeble and many of us end that way, brains no good to us as we descend into madness. Likewise, early courtship begins as such a fumbling tryst and advances to its fulminating giddy apex only to decline once relationships go awry. And so it is with me and Beth. She had nothing but daggers for me when she came in the company limo, Tessa in a change of clothes I managed to scrounge from what little they didn’t pack and take with them. An interesting ensemble, especially when you consider it seems like only two weeks ago my little girl was cutting out the eyes from Hannah Montana pictures.
I compounded my foolishness by asking Beth if she would consider taking me back.
You know sometimes when you ask a question and the viciousness of the reply is a genuine surprise? A betrayal, as vast and absolute as abuse by a parent or the murder of a child. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I certainly didn’t anticipate the metaphorical bucket of ice water, Tessa slinking into the back of the long saloon. I guess the emotional baggage of the day piled on top of me and I lost the hard-won perspective I’d only recently started to see as normal. Nonetheless, to see something bordering hate in eyes I have stared into happily enough on so many occasions . . . the shock remains with me still.
Such a galvanizing experience, however debilitating at first, can’t help but have a practical effect. After some soul-searching, I have stripped, showered and dressed in my leper’s leathers, clinging to the half-life even my own daughter can see for the substanceless mimesis it is.
It is 4pm in the ruins of old New York. I belt into the sky, my mind conceiving a gentle parabola my physics hastens to refine as I accept into the night. Rocketing passage over the Atlantic brings rainclouds and darkness and I am stone-jawed to both as my transit conjures thunder and raindrops the size of fists.
I’m not exactly sure what I’m thinking. Google gave Julian’s location in Normandy, a medieval fortress abutting a market town. A quiet life for the scion of an ignoble house – one the world would be better not to know. And it is as if I speed thither to claim my share of the family shame. I cannot guess how my older half-brother will react.
It is my intention to use England only as an aid to navigation. Yet somewhere over the Cornish coast, the clouds hiding swarms of gargantuan sea birds, a perilous transistor fuzz descends over the forepart of my mind so treacle-smooth I can really only describe it once it departs. And when it does this, I find I am not in Normandy as per my intention, but some rich man’s living room, the French doors open, the fire guttering in the grille fanned by the evening chill.
The Übermensch known to the wider world as Sting hovers in a lotus position before me.
“Good evening, Zephyr. Tea?”
*
EITHER IT’S THE brittle architecture of my mind or the English accent just really shits me, because I curl my fists at the offer of refreshment and consider a response akin to shitting on the rug then and there. If it weren’t for the suggestion of cosmic power roiling in waves off the hovering blonde yogi before me, I might just make good on the inhospitable response my tattered nerves tempt. Or perhaps Sting is making good on his famed redactive control and it’s just a more subtle expression of the hold he’s obviously exerting over me.
“I figure you could make me dance like a monkey if you wanted,” I say with a grimace, fearing my lips won’t move as I make like a ventriloquist. “I take it it was you who brought me here. Why start with manners now?”
“Easy on, lad.”
The ageless-looking Englishman unfolds his legs and seemingly steps down from the hovering pose, though even as he crosses the living room rug barefoot I have the sense still Sting’s not quite touching the ground. My eyes betray me and the superhuman formerly known as Gordon Sumner gives a curious little shrug, accompanied by a wry winking grimace, and beneath that smirk I can still feel the steel cold grip around the base of my mind.
“What do you want?”
“We just wanted a chat,” Sting says.
“We?”
“Patience.”
“Patience?” Obviously I rile at that. “Hey, fuck you. You pulled me out of the clouds. How did you do that? Teleportation?”
“We’ve got the whole British Isles wired,” says a voice from the back of the room. “You might not recall doing it, but you flew here. Quite willingly.”
I look past the billiards table to the back of the big vault-like chamber and there’s George Harrison, the infamous St George, stepping through a curtained doorway and into the room. He still has the big moustache, but there’s a little greying fuzz on his chin since the last time I recollect seeing him on television. While Sting wears only a pair of light track pants, the former Beatle wears a three-piece suit, all white, with a plum red shirt and a white tie, loosened, like a living historical document beneath his unkempt locks. His smile is at one and the same time kindly and sardonic. I have a strong impression of great sadness, looking at him, but I feel punch drunk and probably not the best judge of character right now, especially when these are some of the most famous masks in the world.
Sting came to prominence probably just a few years before the whole Doomsday Man saga. He started as a simple British super, part of a trio who used to joke they were the New Police, their jovial and sometimes politically-barbed approach to the 1980s, like the title they used, suggesting they were something new that the world, or at least Thatcher’s England, had never seen before. As most things do, it proved an elusive ruse. It wasn’t long before the trio went their separate ways, most of them to ignominy, and it would’ve been the same for Sting except he came back supposedly enlightened from a trip to the Far East. Like John Lennon before him, the exposure to yoga and tantric Buddhism greatly boosted his previously unremarkable energy-manipulating powers. The psychic shocks that gave him his original nickname Sting were transformed into a powerful suite of psionic abilities allowing him to become a major international player and even have a role in the détente between the USSR and the West. (That line, “Don’t the Russians love their children too?” had politicians cringing, but it worked.) After that, he
was everyone’s darling, more likely to appear levitating on a chat show boasting of his sexual prowess than actually busting villains. While the similarities to his and my father’s journey have my scalp itching, the fact I’m here with him and St George and they seem to be suggesting they occupy some active national security role is as bewildering as it is intimidating.
“Can’t say I recall the trip here,” says me. “Co-inky-dink? I think not.”
“You can relax, Zephyr,” Sting says. “We mean you no harm.”
“Quite the opposite, in fact,” Harrison says as he walks further into the room. “We hope we can help.”
*
I ROLL MY shoulders and take a few steps just to show I’m in control of my faculties – and to prove it to myself. My stroll takes me to the glowering fireplace and I stay there, resting an arm on the expensive mantelpiece.
“If you want to help, you’ve got a funny way of showing it,” I say.
“Security is a big issue with us,” St George says. “That’s why we could not have you retain any memories of your flight here.”
“So what, I was on autopilot the whole time?”
“Er, actually I flew you in,” Sting says.
At least he has the decency to sound sheepish, though this doesn’t mean I am gonna forgive him.
“Great.”
“Look, Zephyr,” George says. “I knew your father. If you’re looking for him, I’d like to help.”
I am not about to ask where they’re getting this information because I don’t think I’ll like the answer.
“Do you know where he is?” I ask.
“Well, not exactly.”
“Then what fucking help are you?”
I stare at the pair hard enough to make most lesser-grade villains khaki their pants. Instead, an air of gentle bemusement radiates from both. Sting moves around until he’s standing alongside Harrison.
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