“Zephyr, are you alright?”
“Do I look alright to you, agent?”
“I’m just . . . sorry.”
“Glad you are. Glad somebody is. Thank you.”
I think that’s quite enough. I nod curtly and walk down to the elevator and from there to the roof, no real idea where I’m going.
*
ANY OTHER DAY and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tragedian suddenly took a hospital hostage or Cogito emerged from a future timeline to try his hand at ruling the world again. Instead, it begins snowing as I arc across the glittering metropolis with my face clenched tight as my asshole, fists like chunks of coal formed hard as the very earth itself by the fractal pressure of millennia. I hit the water over the river hard enough to leaven flakes of ice from the water’s surface in my wake.
Snow drifts like ash once did across the blackened husk of my childhood home. The yellow crime scene tape hangs wilted like some manner of alien topiary, a neglected reminder of even unhappier times. I am glad the fire crews saved the big tree in the front yard. I used to shimmy into that tree on fine nights with my telescope and a book of the stars, imagining a dad to whom I’d speak my dreams and wonders and fears, drinking in the deliciously bittersweet textures of narcissistic adolescence and romanticized sorrow. How hard done by I felt for many years, cooped up in this house with a pair of crazy dykes who fought and in turn made up in passionate bouts surrounded by so many friends and fellow adventurers it sometimes felt like I fell through the cracks, my obvious masculinity an inconvenience to be ignored. Apart from a few kids possibly weirder than me, my house wasn’t a place where friends gathered, where happy childhoods unfolded. Most the time I was lucky enough the passive aggression of the suburbs meant the other moms soldered their lips shut when they caught a whiff of my unusual home life, and a few of them were even decent enough to not expect their little Johnnies to bring home a better quality of playmate. Once adolescence hit, things weren’t so bad, pubescent rebellion justifying my inner revolution and resistance to the strange alternate dominant order my mothers created within the home.
Now the house is gone. In its place are big sand pits filled with ash and chunks of charcoal and bits and pieces that must’ve once been suitably retro for Maxine to collect. Or Ono. Or whoever.
The back shed is scorched, but still standing, and the greenhouse is flush with dead plants. The only other structure is the coal-limned frame of the metal safe room in the middle of the shell of the floor plan. More police stickers are emblazoned across its fire-scarred surface. Whatever the reason, the titanium door remains in place and I walk through the ashes stepping slowly, but not particularly carefully as I approach the weird structure like it’s some ancient megalith and not a particularly high-tech interference in the memories of my inner child. My hand rests over the locking mechanism and I can feel internal electrics hum. One jolt and the whole thing goes still and the terminator grey surface clicks open and slowly ajar.
The safe room was built in a false cavity between two rooms, narrow enough that only a careful observer would miss the discrepancy in its depths. Having fried its separate power source, I can hardly expect a light as the metal door creaks open and I step into the fridge-like inner space, and there’s a pair of torches on a wire mesh shelf and I flick one on with a snap of my wrist to reveal the submarine bunk beds I never knew about and thankfully never needed all the days of my youth. Likewise a tiny desk, metal also, with a dead computer on it, a small refrigerator below, pens and notepads, a box of Scrabble, a photo album. There are monitors on the facing wall, but these are dead too. I imagine there’s one for every room, my parents prepared for some cataclysmic attack that never came until they provided it themselves. How weird.
I take the photo album from the tray just as a shadow passes the doorway. I snap about and glimpse the ghost with white skin and black hair.
“Joseph.”
“You.”
I toss the book aside and my fists curl in the primal instinct inherent to mankind since the first caveman tussled with his first grizzly. Ono’s devil’s mask forms into a tiny O of surprise and then I power up and smash into her like the last time, and we go tumbling into the blinding daylight.
Zephyr 5.11 “The Demoness”
I SWING MY fist with some satisfaction hard into the side of the Japanese woman’s skull. The force sends her flying like some costly rag figurine, across what once would’ve been the drive and into the aging green-painted pickets of the neighbor’s fence. Ono rolls over amid the grickle grass and poison ivy and oleander, and as she splays her hands, her fingers extend into elongated razors of pure blackness just as her hair writhes far beyond its usual scope to twist and cloak around her body.
“Joseph,” she hisses again in her bizarre, alien-accented voice, the word a warning and a plea at the same time.
I wanted to find this woman and now she’s here all I want to do is smash her into smithereens. I lift my palm and a jolt of crackling disruption lances out to caress her torso and she grimaces and twitches and groans and drops back, rolling once free across the undergrowth, the scattered pickets marking the base of the neighbor’s oak tree bare, an ancient pine swing seat twisted loose, the stilted foundations of the cedar-clad house next door exposed as Ono gets up again and starts to run. I pour on the speed, get behind her with my hands on the backs of her shoulders and run her into the parked SUV hard enough to set off the alarms.
Again comes that nagging little warning voice that if I draw attention here, my personal history gets laid bare. Old Joshua Mollins lived next to us my entire childhood, and when he died a few years back, his niece, the Imperator-driver, slotted into the upwardly mobile district quite nicely. She’ll know me and make the connection like so many others should’ve, and then the fat lady will be truly howling.
The demoness peels herself from the sizeable dent she’s made in the flank of the gunmetal grey chassis of the car, horn and blinkers resounding across the snow-dusted front yard. A single tear of blood runs from Ono’s mouth and down her chin. She seems to leer at me like some blood-drinking thing as she wipes the smear with the back of her palm and her black hair forms and reforms into abstract geometry around her.
“You’re not ready,” Ono says in that clipped tone of hers.
“I want my mother back,” I say.
“I knew you weren’t ready. Might never be ready. This proves it. You’re too much still his child.”
Ono shakes her head and when I move my hand, making like perhaps I’m going to light her up again, one of the tendrils whip out and wrap tight around my wrist. Out of self-preservation alone, I lift my remaining arm and another tendril attaches there as well. Now it’s my turn to sneer as I wonder just how conductive this shadowstuff could really be. I clench my fists tight and give up enough juice to light a small New Hampshire community, only to see the demoness disappear in a swirl of black vapors before I’m done.
The empty air crackles with the discharge just as the wire door of the house bangs open and quicker’n you can say ‘boo,’ I haul ass into the sky.
I return later, as darkness enfolds the city in its embrace, but the photo album is gone. I stand in the banks of ashes and view the yard forlornly, and in a couple of days I will find a letter from Georgia’s lawyer in my new PO Box, transferring ownership of the property into my name. When I call from a payphone with the other members of the team waiting for me to suit up and go help them with a hostage situation at a college football game, the lawyer’s office tells me there’s no records for Maxine whatsoever. Eventually I get the old principal of the firm on the line and he recalls meeting the lady, but given their relationship status there’s nothing legal entitling Max to a share and no details on how to find her even if it did. She’s effectively ceased to exist.
I nod. I have some wealth, suddenly. Later, a few calls to a few people and a ten thousand-dollar check to a planning consultant and the way’s paved for permission to flatten the site and r
ebuild. I don’t have the money for the house myself, but George has left nearly a hundred grand for me and a similar amount for Tessa, and a collector in Hoboken offers a hundred-twenty-five for the scorched Aston Martin in the garage. And in my civvies, I meet him on site and sling some bullshit about Maxine’s retro collection extending to Titanium Girl’s go-go car bought on the cheap not long after she overdosed back whenever that was.
The builders tell me the house could be finished by the end of spring.
I leave the foreman a photo from the street showing how it looked the year of my ninth birthday. There’s a little me in black plastic chaps and a gunslinger’s sombrero, not quite tricked out for the Pride parade, but something close to it. No wonder the old bags approved, since they confiscated the guns that came with the costume because it might be a bad influence or could naturalize the hegemonic power relations inherent to all phallic imagery. The irony.
In the photo I’m looking at the camera like I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing – a cynicism that has remained a constant throughout my life. And I think what once might’ve been a flaw has now been revealed as a vital skill, polished and honed in the dark like an assassin’s knife, and now I’ll need it like I’ve never needed it before.
*
THE ICE IS building up on the sidewalks of Atlantic City. I sling a homeless guy five dollars. Anything else and I’d have to write a check, even though being able to write a check is a relatively new experience for me. He looks at me with puppy dog eyes and I can’t help but wince and think he could certainly do with a long weekend at a day spa. I need him to move so I can access the lobby of my old digs, we’re like best pals. He mouths something unintelligible and I get in through the familiar Perspex doors and scan the mailboxes for the name change I already anticipated.
Beth has gone back to O’Shaunnessy. Like I said, I’m not surprised.
I thumb the lift, relaxed and handsomely disheveled in aviator sunglasses, a dirty white t-shirt under a loose leather jacket, chinos, new Rossi cycle boots. If you think that sounds like the civilian paradigm of my hero costume, you wouldn’t be the first to have that thought. The military issue great coat I wear over the whole thing rather dims the effect, but fuck, it’s snowing.
The smell of Elisabeth’s cigarettes cling to the carriage even as I ride up. Trepidation fills my mouth, threatens to leak from my ass. Sorry for the image, but it’s true. I’m more afraid of this than going toe-to-toe with World-Eater or the Ill Centurion. And history tells me I have very good reason to fear.
She’s on the phone as she opens the door, my arrival completely unexpected (forewarned is forearmed, as they say, and I can’t have that). In her other hand is a cigarette and for some reason the faucet in the kitchen is running full-bore as well. Her eyes go hooded when she sees me. The cigarette, stuck for convenience in the corner of her mouth, droops indicatively and the smoke clings to the intermission between us like a ghost.
“Jenny,” Beth says, pronouncing it the Swedish way. “I’ll call you back.”
In a practiced move she disconnects the cell and pockets it, swaps the smoke from her lips to her hand and rests one palm against the door frame.
“Hi,” I say.
“What are you doing here?”
“Going to invite me in?”
Beth takes a drag. This is too studied a performance to be impromptu. That means she’s been anticipating such a moment, preparing for it.
“Nope. Answer my question.”
“I had to stop by and get something.”
“I thought I told you to make sure you didn’t need to come back?”
“Hey,” I say and shrug and give a lame laugh. “I’m only human, OK?”
Beth harrumphs.
“I don’t think you can use that excuse.”
But she steps aside and lets me into the apartment.
Nothing has changed except entirely new décor. Only the television remains, tuned to that show where Dirk Cameron plays a hero who’s lost his powers and struggles on as a nocturnal vigilante called the Bat Man or something equally stupid. As I blink in slow motion, it cuts to an ad break for colostomy bags and then a promo for the Paragon/Jocelyn wedding special. I shudder.
“You’re not here to watch TV, Joe,” Beth scolds me. She exhales pent-up smoke and adds, “Get on with it.”
“Fucking hell, Beth. Try and be civil, will ya?”
I ignore her astonished glare and go for the bathroom and then into the wallspace. I refuse to linger long enough for nostalgia and depression to beset me. A pall of dust already clings to my pathetic old secret headquarters and it only takes me a moment to scrape my business card collection into a shopping bag I have coincidentally found in my pocket. It has an old pop tart in it that I decide to save for later. I don’t think I’ve worn this coat since Tessa was a little kid. I glance around once knowingly and then step back into the white bathroom and thump the panel that closes the secret door.
Beth’s cooling her heels in the kitchen nook. She’s smoking again, one arm across her chest and under her elbow. Her dark hair spills like a conundrum over the shoulders of a white mohair cardigan left erotically unbuttoned near her navel. She’s also wearing $500 Ralph Lauren cargo pants and strappy Vivica Watson sandals.
“Where’s Tess?”
“At a friend’s.” Beth inhales, exhales. “You really fucked her over with this whole grandmother thing.”
“That would be my . . . dead . . . mother,” I reply.
She shrugs as if to suggest I’ve fabricated the whole thing just to be inconvenient.
“They were just starting to get close.”
“You must’ve hated that.”
Point scored, Beth glares and says nothing. She turns, abruptness written in every line of her body, and grinds out the cigarette end in the moist sink.
“Time’s up, Joseph.”
I nod slowly, already backing for the door.
“I am actually glad.”
Zephyr 5.12 “My Pal The Anti-Hero”
HERE I AM with the keys to the kingdom and not sure I’ve really got the bottle to use it, as the Brits might say. There’s enough reasons in my life to feel like shit without even starting to examine the problems associated with my costumed alter ego. But like the ringing phone on my belt, sometimes these things just pop up their heads to say “Hi” and vomit like a baby down your back.
As a true indication of my scattered thoughts, I have flown from my old apartment to Fort Hancock, the foamy grey expanse of the Atlantic and the hovering gulls a strange salve to my disenchantment. I haven’t been here since I was a kid and in fact didn’t even remember it until arriving here, drawn to the big wind-tattered billboards promising a housing development that lost its finance years ago. I move to a neglected boardwalk seat and drop onto it heavily, just another leather-jacketed drifter in the rundown part of town.
“What is it now?” I moan to Seeker as I answer the incessant call.
“Where are you?”
“Why is that the first thing people ask when ringing a cell?” I say. “You’ve got gazillions of Twenty-First Century tech in that baby of yours. Can’t you track me?”
I hang up the phone having set the challenge. Poor Seeker will probably interpret it is a cry for help and sure enough there’s a familiar time-space wobbling sensation and the Wallachian fortress materializes somewhere behind me. I don’t turn or otherwise acknowledge it and wait until Seeker herself walks down the planks behind me, hand on the back of the bench tentative as she drinks in my foul mood and the seaweed-reeking ambience. It might’ve been snowing, but the ocean wind befouls the stuff almost immediately so it becomes just another part of the rotting clime.
“Are you feeling messed up?”
“You don’t want to know about,” I say. “Really. Why were you calling?”
“I wanted to know you’ve got this Mafia thing handled,” she says.
“You were calling about that? Jesus.”
�
��Please, Zephyr. The blasphemy. . . .”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
We stare at the ocean a while.
“I’ll speak to Azzurro about the Riker’s thing,” I say eventually.
“That would be good. Call the team in, if you get anything.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic,” Seeker says. “Zephyr, don’t you want to be on the team anymore?”
“Jeez, we’ve barely started,” I say.
“Yeah I know, and I don’t think you’ve shown much enthusiasm even then.”
“More than Samurai Girl. Where the fuck did she go?”
“I don’t know,” Seeker says. “I’m worried about her.”
“Me too, I guess,” I lie. “Maybe that’s something you guys could look into. You know, while I’m handling the Mafia thing?”
“You think?”
I decline to bite the girl’s head off. Instead, I stand and gruffly grip the rail, a big piece of it snapping off in my hand. I throw it into the brine and it makes a fizzing noise like it’s dissolved as it sinks from view.
“You don’t sound very happy,” Seeker says and I count to three before her hand rests on my shoulder.
“I’ve just got a few things going on at the moment,” I tell her. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be on board in a little bit. Try and dig up what you can on our missing teammate and give me a holler when you need to get the team together.”
I look at her for the first time. Seeker’s brown eyes are moist with emotion.
“I guess that means I should go,” she says.
I nod. She takes a few hesitant steps towards the mother ship.
“You don’t want a ride?”
“No,” I say. “I’ve got a few things to handle here. You go ahead.”
Seeker nods and says something else I don’t quite catch and then she stuffs her hands into the pockets of the white parka she is wearing as a winter variation to her costume as she mounts the ramp and the drawbridge and disappears back inside the castle.
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