Thinking about the lies my mothers have told me, I know the Island isn’t my first priority anyway. I’ve got other fish to fry first.
I rocket in a lazy arc into the stratosphere and let planetary spin ease the journey home. I am not a big fan of the thinning atmosphere, but my limbs ache as it is, and when I begin the descent, I feel giddy and solemn as my plunge takes me back into a world consumed by darkness which feels now like a mirror to all the bad shit accumulating like nicotine to the lungs of my soul.
Getting to the bottom of my family history is starting to look like a real bitch.
*
AT THE APARTMENT most of my things are in boxes, half of them dedicated to the Salvation Army at my discretion. I strip from the costume like a surfer, the upper body hanging around my waist as I pour the contents of the refrigerator between two big slabs of stale rye bread and stand at the sink raining blood-colored drips from the beetroot dribbling into the garbage disposal. The plates and all that other domestic crap I will soon be freed from are cleaned and stacked in the cupboards, ready for my wife and daughter’s return. Ordinarily of an evening I would be maudlin by now, watching the sum total of three or four hours’ footage I have from when Tessa was young and Beth and I still had a chance. Now there’s only an empty chasm in my chest and a glower on my stubble-heavy face. I haven’t had an ordinary flu or virus since I was fifteen, but damn me to Hell if I’m not coming down with something.
Sleep comes uneasily. I lay in the middle of the big double bed spread-eagled like I’m waiting for the bondage to begin and that’s exactly what it feels like, preparation for some kind of torture rather than sleep, and it occurs to me some time around 5am that lately I have spent more nights on the sofa than in the bedroom so it is no wonder I feel so damned uncomfortable. Around 7am, with the grey of the city starting to emerge through the banks of fog rolling in off the Atlantic, I finally relent and pick up the comforter and trudge through to the big window-spanning couches and lay down again and fall not too long after into a relatively dreamless sleep.
The phone rings mid-afternoon and I sit up, calm as a businessman expecting his regular wake-up call. After wiping the crap from my lips I answer the unfamiliar number.
“It’s me. Speak.”
“It’s . . . Beth,” my wife says.
“Oh.” I yawn.
“Were you . . . did I wake you?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus, Joe. You really have to sort yourself out. Did you get my messages?”
I look at the machine. It’s blinking. I’d lie, but know she would catch me out. That may just be what this whole thing is about.
“No,” I reply. “I got in late.”
“Obviously. We’re moving in on Sunday.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s the day after tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
Beth pauses. It is my own fault for being half asleep, but I am damned if I can think of anything to say to halt the horrible direction of this conversation any more than I could arrest any of the others. It’s like watching a childhood accident in slow motion and having the sheer particles of time agglomerate against your limbs to stop you doing anything about it. All I can hope is that my soon-to-be former wife has at least some pity left, though as usual of late my hoping is in vain.
“You will be gone, won’t you?” she asks cautiously. “I don’t just mean moved out. I don’t want you to be there when we come back.”
“Christ, Beth. What did I do to make you so fucking cruel?”
“You did nothing, Joe,” she snaps back.
“That’s not meant to make you feel better. I’m not saying ‘it’s not you, it’s me’. My point is you did nothing. Okay? Nothing. And this is what you get when all that nothing accumulates over time. A great big FU.”
I want to tell her I had hopes we could work this thing out. The real poison of the situation is that I now catch myself thinking about what she will say to my words, how I am throwing myself at her feet like a worm, like my pride and self-esteem are already compromised. My limited sense of self-preservation in such things stills my tongue and between the strategizing, my ruptured feelings, and my underlying desires, I have no real idea what I really do think. Such speculation is enough. The moment my response falters, Beth snaps her final instructions and goes.
There doesn’t seem to be anything more to it. The phone drops in several pieces from my hand, molten plastic dribbling like a Subway dressing onto the glass coffee table. For good measure, I flash-fry the answering machine. As it flips over and the hard drive starts to bake, the bank starts playing back on a wavering line.
“Hey dad? It’s just me. Tessa. Tried calling on your other phone, but it said you were overseas? I’m at George and Max’s till tomorrow tonight and I wanted to see you. Mum said . . . she said we’re moving to England. Can you please get back to me?” There’s a sound like tears. “Please. I’m scared and I don’t know what to do.”
The machine gives up a little mini nuke cloud and the sound cuts out.
Zephyr 4.15 “Damned Near Herculean”
IT TAKES PRECISELY three minutes, fifteen seconds for me to regret the trick with the phone. Although I’ve cooked a few in my time – among the various other things and the numerous sets of sheets I’ve fried just from having bad dreams over the years during my marriage – on many occasions I have practiced the sort of restraint that you’d expect from any ordinary self-interested fella trying not to totally compromise his marriage. In me, though, you have to recognize that such efforts are damned near Herculean, and fuck it, I don’t know why I am explaining myself to you anyway. That phone – and yes I mean that phone in particular – had it coming for a long time. Trust me.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t do much to soothe my ire when I realize I can’t exactly make the call to the removalists from my Enercom phone, the one with the little stylized lightning bolt on gold now on the red-and-black case. It takes a while, but I get a VoiP program running in the wallspace and hook up the headphones and manage to get on to a removalist and a storage place and then I dress in uncomfortable civilians and go for a walk, stop in at the 24-hour and nuke two chili dogs and get some pork rinds and a Coke slushee and a copy of the Post, the Inquirer and Teenscene (I am on the cover again, and even I am wondering now what they want with a has-been thirty-five-year-old on the cover of a magazine for under-sixteens). I sit at a bus stop and consume the junk food while a homeless man makes deranged attempts to hoover under my feet and those of everyone else legitimately waiting for transport. He’s only got an imaginary vacuum, doesn’t even have any props, and the shoom-shoom noises start to really get on my nerves until the bus turns up and the driver salutes him, calls him either Vern or Venom, I’m not sure which, and everyone else but me clears out for at least the next fifteen minutes leaving me in peace.
I have to say I am disappointed not to have heard from Sal Doro in a while and I take my revenge by stuffing the skimmed newspaper into the trash and upending the remains of my drink on it. The death of newspapers writ small. Idly wanting a cigarette, I’m on my way back to the apartment for one of the last times and plotting out my approach to my mothers’ house when the Zephyr phone rings and I dig it out and answer surreptitiously, since I am in civilian guise. It’s Paragon.
“Hey Zephyr. Long time no hear, pal. What gives?”
“Yeah, I’ve been busy and stuff,” I reply as I hike against the press of foot traffic coming from the afternoon Cineplex around the corner from where I live, used to live, the new Nic Cage film Cinderella Man coming out to the amusement of the critics. At least it looks better than his previous effort, him in that fucking awful superhero film Hancock.
“I haven’t seen you at Nephilim or Orchard,” Paragon says and sounds like he’s about to recite the whole frigging list. I cut in on him.
“Actually, Para, I’ve been pretty busy with the whole, you know, the new team I’m putting together.”
“Well, I�
��ve only heard whispers,” he replies in a voice sounding like he’s channeling his elderly Jewish stepmother. “I don’t suppose you need an impossibly handsome, physically impervious type, do ya?”
“Hey, we’ve got me for that, right?”
Paragon is unperturbed. The sarcasm slides off him like eggs from a Teflon pan.
“Actually, you know, Jocelyn and I have been working on some of our moves. We’d make a pretty awesome combo.”
It seems like Paragon has taken up some of Red Monolith’s surfer dude drawl since the poor kid died – like it’s some type of living tribute or something. It only makes me remember my friend with a sadness that also reminds me Paragon is no Red Monolith. Stoner or not, the guy could shred. And Jocelyn is no Angelina Jolie.
“I thought she would have to be kinda careful, now, Para? With the baby?”
“Well, yeah.” Paragon halts, changes gears, veers off again. “At least tell me you’re not going to miss the wedding of the century, Zeph?”
“Gee, I didn’t think I’d received an invite yet. . . ?”
“Well yeah, it’s in the mail, Zephyr,” Paragon says ironically.
“I’m sure I’ll see you at the premiere.”
“So that’s Sunday night, right?” Paragon asks.
I had forgotten to this point that the big unveiling coincided with my eviction from the family home. I sigh haltingly.
“That’s right.”
“I’ll be the guy with the glowing golden aura,” he says, never tiring of that one.
His laughter clatters down the phone line like tin cans tied to a newlywed’s car.
“So what were you after, pal?”
“Oh yeah, I was just going to ask,” the golden one replies. “Have you seen Darkstorm lately? Even Stiletto says she doesn’t know where he’s gone.”
The reference vaguely tickles my mind, but I have to shrug. Besides, my building arrives.
“Can’t help you there,” I say. “You know, away from the clubs Darkstorm and I. . . .”
“Oh, I understand totally,” Paragon says. “I mean even for me, he and I, well, we’re like night and day.” Again with the laughter. “Jocelyn was really insistent he was at the wedding, though. I was just calling around a few people, but no one’s heard. . . .”
“That’s a real shit. Hey Paragon, I think I just saw one of Thoughtstorm’s flying sky-labs over near the Silver Tower. Got to go.”
“Oh you were flying the whole time? You should’ve said. Sorry.”
“Hey don’t mention it,” I say and throw the pork rinds pack in the bin and sweep through the entrance to the apartment building.
“You want me to dust the bike off and ride over, see if you need a hand?”
“I’ve got this one. Thanks all the same.”
“Okay,” Paragon says with an air of something bordering on the wistful. “Well, we’ve got to do more to catch up, sometime soon. And I don’t mean at Transit. . . .”
“Yeah, we’ll do that. Holy shit, is that the Skeleton Queen? Got to go.”
I disconnect. The old lady in the lobby thinks I’m referring to her and she stabs her index finger at me and spits her falsies into her hand, muttering something vile in Ukranian or Finno-Ugric. Not hard to shrug off. I continue the ride upstairs buoyed by the solvent fats now bubbling through my system. Once in the wallspace, I change for what could be the last time and then just stand there, surveying the unwitting trophies I have collected during the interim of my career, the skewered stacks of receipts and post-it notes, the obsolete computer, the Zephyr animated series calendar and the crates of test merchandise that never made it to full release when those Pixar fuckers went bust. A fine layer of dust covers everything, like the reverse of the luster an old man gives to memories of youth. The decrepitude is all too apparent, even to me. When I jack from the secret window, it is for the last time, I am thinking, latching the revolving door closed in the silent space left behind.
An envelope with $20 for the super includes the key and instructions to let in the workmen the following morning.
And if it all falls apart, I’ll probably never really notice anyway.
I throw my fist toward Queens and vengeance.
*
SOMETHING ABOUT BEING electrocuted limits even my colorful reach of vocabulary. I guess they don’t call it a bolt from the blue for nothing. Sure, while I am technically immune to all but the strongest electrical effects, and though I wouldn’t call it pain, having ten thousand volts channeled through you still feels like a motherfucker.
Why am I crapping on like this? You’re all hot to hear about my mad dash to home, saving the domestically imperiled Windsong and confronting my latest nemesis, my own damned mother. Hell, I’m pretty keen to get there too, only some damned fool decides to quite literally give me a taste of my own medicine.
The attack knocks my from mid-air.
While I am flailing I am not concentrating on my flight vector and as a result I tumble through a set of power lines, the awning of a factory-direct bakery operation and destroy about a thousand dollars’ worth of empty wooden crates. Picking splinters from my ‘do, my glare travels upward to where this donkey-headed cocksucker stands on the third-floor roof of the building opposite and gives the most ridiculous wave that I can only assume he’s one of these schizoid bozos who dress up in costume just to get their asses kicked. It’s a repressed sexual thing and I say this regardless of being a guy who dresses in head-to-toe leather for most my waking hours.
Most these guys are powerless twerps. Obviously, this one is a bit different from the rest. He’s wearing a charcoal-colored rubberized bodysuit with weird patterns on the chest and upper arms that make me think of a circuit board. Later, when he reveals his name is Helix, I want to grab him by his admirable coif of hair and explain that this is not a helix depicted on his costume, but by then we’re onto the next chapter and besides, problems with his apparel are the least of my worries.
He steps from the roof of the building and sorta floats to the ground in a whoosh of familiar air movements. I close my eyes and extend outward with my weird extra sense and confirm my suspicions – he’s flying the same way I do. Between that and the lightning bolt, I risk the assumption he’s somehow copied my powers.
A famous man once said shooting someone in the chest is a pretty good test of finding out how much damage they can take. Likewise, suspecting this fucktard’s not just copied but possibly stolen my abilities, I decide prudence has the edge on valor and the moment his little black booties touch the ground, I light him up with a return serve plus a little tip. It is – well, refreshing isn’t really the word, but maybe you get what I mean – to see the black-clad figure arch his back and stretch his mouth open in a wordless howl. I cross the distance pretty much before the calamity is finished and punctuate his sentence with a couple of solid hooks to the ribs and a follow-through to the side of the head.
Unsurprisingly, this makes Helix a little more manageable. He rebounds from the solid brick wall of the St Assumpta Home For Recuperating Gentlemen and staggers right into another haymaker. Unusually for me, I hold the blow in check as I watch the guy’s eyes roll around beneath his black face mask. Just before they lose their luster entirely, his eyes find mine and he drops to his knees.
“Zephyr, man, what are you doing? Don’t you know I’m a huge fan?”
*
I CROSS MY arms and don’t say anything as my recently flash-fried acquaintance struggles back to his feet and continues with the introductions.
“My name is Helix, dude. I thought you be totally boned to know I was emulating your powers,” he says.
“Leave a comment on my website,” says me.
I start to turn away and Helix lurches forward, grabbing me by the shoulder. I’ve had about as much manhandling as I can handle for the festive season already so I grab the offending paw and give a pretty good twist. Helix is still taking a few lungfuls of not-quite-Christmas air when I sweep my boot behind hi
s knees and he goes down on his keister.
“If you touch me again, pal, I am going to do to you what the Brits did to William Wallace.”
The guy looks up with puppy dog eyes and gingerly makes to stand.
“I don’t understand. I’m, like, your biggest fan.”
“For one, that’s technically not true,” I reply. “There’s a lady in Wichita I paid good money to burn the photographs that prove it. Second, if you were a big fan, I’m sure we would’ve met before now, especially if you can do what you say you can.”
“I’m a, what they call a, power emulator,” Helix says like the news was a bit of a bummer even to him. “I was stuck copying the powers of Mister Magnetic until I, like, learnt how to unlock them.”
“You’re from . . . Kansas?”
“Yeah.”
“Commiserations. Look, it’s a pretty simple hint, but given your performance today I think it’s still worthwhile. If you want to make nice with people, you should probably avoid electrocuting them, ‘K?”
I nod, start to turn away, and then that stoner-slacker voice starts again.
“You can take it okay though, can’t you, Zephyr?”
“It’s not about whether I can take it or not, pal,” I tell him. “Folks like us, we take enough knocks just doing the whole hero thing without our freaking fans using powers on us, right?”
“I thought it’d be like the highest form of flattery.”
“No, that’s imitation, which I guess you’ve got down pat. There’s nothing flattering about nearly being killed.”
Helix nods. “Well, okay.” He nods his head, bummed again. “Great to finally meet you, anyway.”
“Yeah, that was really fantastic, kid. Let’s try not to do this again, OK?”
I walk off a bit because that’s what I do when I’m trying to gather my shit and get ready to fly again. I’ve barely cleared my right nostril before another blue flash lights the scene and I feel energy coursing through my system.
Zephyr Box Set 1 Page 40
