The old lady recites a mobile number and I mentally high-five myself and ignore my connecting train and pull out the Enercom phone as the station becomes deserted and I add the number to my address book and then dial it.
A voice, cold as the grave, answers on the fifth ring.
“Who is this?” he asks.
I swallow cautiously and glance around.
“Geoff, it’s me. Zephyr.”
“Joseph,” the Nightwatchman replies in his most unpleasant-sounding voice to date. “How are you? Not well, from what the Post is telling people.”
“Look, about that: we need to meet.”
“Do we?” my old contact replies. “I think perhaps it’s you who needs to meet me. You’ll find all the voices in my head are in agreement on that one.”
I sigh and lean my head against the cold dirty tiles of the wall and then jerk back as a couple of Asian tourists in legwarmers shuffle onto the platform and the sign chimes to show six minutes to the next arrival.
“Will you fucking meet with me or not?”
“Why of course, since you ask so charmingly,” the Nightwatchman says. “Are you free tonight? I’ll just be, you know, hanging around.”
“Fuck, Geoffrey. Were you this annoying in high school?”
“Worse,” the slightly lycanthropic voice replies. “I was on the homecoming committee, remember?”
“Yeah. Somehow I forgot that.”
“So, outside, or should I say, above one of these ridiculous little flesh bars you frequent?”
“I’m . . . a little vertically challenged at the moment,” I say in a pained voice.
“So there’s some truth to the rumors. . . .”
“What did Sal Doro say?”
“Oh it wasn’t Sal,” Geoffrey replies with a lightness that suggests he knows the old hack well. “It’s his junior scribe. Nate Simon?”
“What the hell does that guy know?”
“Well, I’ve always wondered,” the dark voice on the other end of the line pauses. “What exactly does Seeker taste like?”
Zephyr 7.6 “Six Ways To Fucking Sunday”
I STRUGGLE UP the platform near Jeremy Bentham Avenue muttering imprecations on the gods, the fates, the crowds, the simple shitty bad luck that has reduced me to the level of your average everyday homo commutis. The bulk of my fellow Atlanteans have elected to jack into the aural cyberspace of their iPods rather than confront the dismal reality around them, the newest and perhaps most grand city in the world already awash with disease, dirt and scum.
Homeless people dance like medieval jesters around a collection tin on the corner from the subway while a black lady with bandaged eyes bangs a tambourine. Few pause to watch, though the trickle of coins is steady even in a city where so many people desperately need to be somewhere else all the time.
A block from the train line, the shadows of the skyscrapers recant and some of the old Bohemian character of Boston’s college district manages to peek through the post-Kirlian rewrite, the buildings clustered European-style to four storeys and record shops and recycling boutiques and cafes and continental delicatessens and pawnbrokers and street artists define the street. Looming over the intersection is a billboard, I don’t know what it’s selling, the words DISAPPEAR HERE a promise and a threat.
With my hands stuffed in my pockets I could be any other madman talking to himself and contemplating violent acts except for the fact I was so recently a self-described hero. I pause at a newspaper display and the headline reads “Sentinels in disarray”. A mutant kid, only about eight or nine years old, but covered in grandpa stubble, hisses at me with a forked tongue as I start off again and almost stumble into his path. I’ve barely recovered from this when a blonde woman in a Versace overcoat steps from the lee of a nearby health food shop and affixes her sunglasses and almost instantly discloses her true identity.
“Holland!” I call without really thinking about it, and the gorgeous curvy blonde halts a moment and double-takes me as I hustle up the block towards her.
“Sorry, do I know you?” she asks.
“It is you, right?”
“What?”
“Holland?”
“Yeah,” she replies without perhaps all the confidence she could.
She removes her glasses and looks at me again with that universal calm most beautiful women manage quite naturally faced with a panting male.
“I’m, uh . . . It’s me. My name’s Joseph.”
“Joseph,” she repeats. “We’ve met before?”
“Yeah, but we were both wearing masks last time.”
A visible chill runs through her and her natural instinct is to scan the street for threats and exits, ready to grapple for either one.
“It’s OK,” I tell her. “I know more than you probably even do yourself. How’s the memory.”
“Are you . . . Zephyr?”
“I’m gonna neither confirm nor deny, you know what I’m saying?” I reply and grin and hope that’s enough for her.
“Gee whiz, this is crazy,” Holland says.
“Gee whiz?” I laugh, charmed, aware I’m like a puppy on heat. “People still use that phrase?”
“As much as I can remember,” Holland answers drily and motions for me to walk with her to where a very feminine green bicycle is chained to the metal guard around a street tree awash in cigarette butts.
“You live around here?”
“Mmm. Close by.”
“I’m not stalking you,” I say.
“I wonder why not?”
We both laugh. I glance along the street and identify a coffee shop and point off-handedly.
“Fancy a drink?”
The tall woman eyes the café and her expression remains frosty.
“I wouldn’t mind something a little stronger,” she says. “In fact, I wouldn’t mind something that could give me my life back. How about you?”
*
DAMNED IF I know why, but I end up telling her the whole thing. The woman doesn’t even know her surname, yet she nods and sips a G&T and then a European beer as I lay out the quagmire my life’s become. In turn, she tells me how she’s working for cash wages in a gay and lesbian bookshop since she can’t even establish a social security number or find anything about her bank accounts.
“You haven’t just tried, like, handing yourself in at a police station and asking for their help to identify you?” I ask and nod to her offer of another beer, since she’s paying.
“And wind up where?” Holland asks. “Committed to an institution of some kind? As far as I can tell there’s nothing wrong with me except I can’t remember a damned thing about my life before the time I crawled out of the bricks at Twilight’s place.”
I nod, pausing slightly and unwilling to comment on anything else she might be thinking. Into that gap she speaks again, dropping her voice low.
“And then of course there’s that other thing.”
She directs my gaze under the table to where one hand begins to sparkle with an ethereal light. Just as quickly, the brightness dissolves into an inky darkness that seems to creep up her wrist like liquid night.
“What do you, uh, do?” I ask.
“I’m not sure what you call it,” she says, keeping the intimate tone. And she smiles briefly, though like her no-longer-green hair, it is pale in the dingy light of the bar. “You’ve got to remember that along with my twenty-five years or so, I’m pretty ignorant about the whole superhero thing as well.”
I nearly make some quip about my daughter, but wolf back the words and say something simpering and treacherous about “the calling” to dress up in a cape and lurid pants.
“I had some memory,” she says and looks off into the middle distance. “And when I tried to remember, suddenly I was standing there wearing this . . . costume . . . designed by pornographers, I think, and my hair was green and I could fly, and control the light, and all these other things, and, well, call it ridiculous or what have you, but it was the most incredib
le thing I’ve ever experienced.”
“As far as you know,” I smirk.
Her nose twitches when she laughs and I smile, teenaged again.
“Actually,” she says, sobering, “I have to go. I’m due at work.”
I stand and she stands and shells out a few dollars onto the table and the bartender in the empty café looks up briefly from his magazine and then returns us our privacy.
“So can we meet up again some time?” I ask.
Holland’s dimples appear and I feel like a jerk for being so smitten, but there she is before me, completely unawares I know how her cunt tastes, even if it wasn’t her in the driver’s seat at the time.
“Maybe,” she says. “Yeah. You know where I work, now.”
“You didn’t actually say.”
“Madame Christ’s,” Holland says and winks. “Cornelius and Fifty-First.”
“OK. Well I know now.”
She starts to smile again, a quick retort from her mouth, and then she catches herself, her expression halfway to somber again.
“I was going to say maybe I’ll see you out there in costume first, but I guess until you work out this whole powers thing. . . ?”
“Yeah. It’s a . . . turd.”
She touches my arm, fingers as light as a feather.
“Good luck with, you know, all of it.”
“Thanks, Holland.”
“Seeya, Joe.”
The curvy blonde tightens the belt on her overcoat and slips through the café doors as a light rain begins to fall and somewhere a siren is ringing and neither of us give it a second thought.
*
IT IS FRIDAY. The papers have performed the autopsy and the news for the Sentinels isn’t good, but I’m not thinking about any of that. Mechano’s is pulsing with ambulatory light below, but I am up on a fire escape ladder like a false copy of my former self, neon reflecting off the gold badge of the zed on my chest as I avoid any glimpses from below.
“Zephyr,” the voice comes from across the rooftop. “Over here.”
From the outside I know I am the perfect simulacrum, but the truth lies plain as a corpse between us and the Nightwatchman and I know there is no skirting the reality here. I step gingerly over an air-conditioning unit and the black-clad ghost is there with the steam rising elegantly behind him, theatrical like I know he likes it because at the end of the day for all his quirks the crazy bastard is just another one of us.
“So what the fuck happened to you?” Geoff asks.
“Shanghaied,” I reply. “Walked into a trap. Bitch killed my powers.”
“Name?”
“Spectra.”
“Never heard of her,” he says.
“Yoko Ono.”
“The . . . Japanese chick who broke up the Beatles?”
“Yeah.”
“She must be seventy by now,” the Nightwatchman snorts. “Zephyr, you pussy.”
“I don’t know how she does it, but she’s about as close to seventy as you are,” I tell him. “And she had a legion of super goons there ready to wail on my ass.”
“Anyone I know?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want me for?”
Although I thought I had prepared for this, my word hoard is empty and I gesture to the benighted scene around us and have to laugh, embarrassed, and shake my head.
“It’s a hell of a thing,” I say weakly and feel ill and glance away, almost wishing now someone could break this up.
The Nightwatchman never registered and there’s an open warrant for his arrest even without the various policemen they claim he’s assaulted over the years.
“Just speak, Joe.”
Geoffrey never calls me by name, or hardly ever, though I have rarely returned him the favor. I lift my head now and the bondage mask simply stares at me, alien and remote despite my sudden expectation of warmth and understanding from this most law-abiding of potential serial killers.
“There’s a man called Seagal in California,” I say at last. “I think he killed my mother and I think he’s killed again. If someone doesn’t bring him to justice, Synergy and Vanguard and their gal pals are gonna wade in and there could be bodies from here to Washington.”
“Sounds dire,” the Nightwatchman replies.
“Will you look into it?”
“Me?”
The cold laughter shocks me as assuredly as a bucket of water over the head.
“Well, yeah,” I say.
“I don’t think so, Zephyr.”
“I’m not . . . you don’t get this, I think. I’m not Zephyr now.”
“Then why did you dress up like that tonight?”
For a moment there’s nothing I can tell him. I gesture obliquely again and then look at the gold zed on my chest reflecting the horned moon.
“I guess I thought I might be able to fool you.”
“And instead you’re fooling yourself.”
“I don’t have the powers this requires,” I tell him.
“The Zephyr I know would never admit that,” Geoffrey replies. “He’s too much of a total ass.”
We laugh, which is to say I laugh and he snickers softly beneath the mask as much in pity as sympathy and when I lift my hurt, embarrassed gaze again, the fucker stands with an air of imminent departure.
“You’re better than this,” he says. “Let’s pretend this never happened. I catch you again without your powers and I’m gonna beat you six ways to fucking Sunday, bitch.”
The Nightwatchman taps the side of his temple meaningfully and steps backwards over the edge of the building and disappears. I barely flinch, accustomed to the carnival trick, and sit simply with my hands clutched together and a weak, embarrassed, pitiful, self-deprecatory smirk softening to a whimper on my face.
Zephyr 7.7 “Less Than Zero”
THE APARTMENT OVERLOOKS the water like Loren wants, but the view is mostly TV aerials and satellite dishes and a few neon bar signs before the masts and chimneys of the tug boats rise up a half-block distant. We have pitifully few possessions to move in and together we lug a broken sofa from the alley outside up three flights of fire escape and sit before the warehouse window of the open loft and watch the silvery reflection of the water on the tin roofs across from us.
“This is nice,” Loren says and cuddles into my arm and rests her cheek on my shoulder. “Thank you.”
“I’m not sure what you’re thanking me for,” I say a little sulkily. “You paid the bond.”
“I know you’ll pay me back.”
I lean forward and sink my face into my hands.
“Jesus Christ.”
“What’s the matter?” Loren’s fingers scratch through the hair on the back of my head and I sigh, but the relief is transitory.
“My life,” I say, words muffled.
“Is it all that bad?” she says and makes a warm, comforting noise.
I can’t say anything to her because I know what she’s thinking. All the same, my life is in tatters compared to what I had before. A beautiful and empathic girlfriend sadly does not equal up to everything I’ve left behind. And the marvel of it all is that my life has fallen apart in record time, so quickly that I barely noticed any of it change until now, sitting with the springs pricking into my butt and the smell of rats fucking and effluent and motor oil and dust and old wood and the ghosts of Christmases past and whatever the hell it was they used to do in this converted factory a hundred years ago all cloying in my nose.
It strikes me with sudden, credible force that I’m in shock.
While that is some succor – meaning once I have cried and yelled and slept and ate, I will probably be able to put one foot in front of the other again – at the same time the irreversible fact is putting my feet on the ground is the only thing I’m ever likely to be able to do, ever again. I flew – I truly flew – not like anything the Earth had ever seen before, and now all those abilities and my rich, indefatigable senses are stripped back to prosaic reality, trapping me
in the prison of urban life with the millions of others who once looked up at me and felt the dream stir and the confronting reality that I am like a fiction compared to them and their dreary ongoing undeniable normalcy. And not just to fly, but to cheat death, smash physics, defend justice and dance before the Devil’s breath and be able to laugh about it over drinks at Halogen or the Flyaway or Silver Tower or even sneaking through the back at Transit or Aubergine, some model on my arm and the Power of Greyskull in my loins.
Loren gets up to check the hot water and I bow over again and want to vomit.
It’s now fifty-eight hours since I asked Synergy to give me a day to think on things and the Zephyr phone’s battery has run down in my gym bag.
Fuck fuck fuck fucketty fuck.
*
A WEEK LATER and we have a bed and a refrigerator and a cat named Duffy who lets himself through a loose pane in one of the windows and comes and goes across the waterfront as he pleases, a perfect arrangement really because the first few days in the apartment in Van Buren are a blur of take-out and late nights and deeply carnal sex and me lying on my stomach with the glow of Budweiser red coming through the dirty glass as Loren sits up, hair spilling over her luscious boobs, a finger marking tracery across my back as she discusses space, the universe and everything, and I mark the time in monosyllables, a deep, monolithic, existential woe working its way through my system like the mother of all bowel disorders, and I cling to the promise that there will be a time again when I am no longer feeling less than zero and Loren, patient and penitent as she is, merely purses her lips and says nothing when I threaten to spoil the mood; and after counting to a hundred or doing her rosary or reciting the names of the saints under her breath or whatever it is she does, a contented smile returns to her perfect features and she rolls me over and inflames my inevitable lazy lust and we do it all again.
“You’re missing the life,” she says nonsensically one morning as we sit on the edge of the futon eating cereal and watching Duffy chase a tumbleweed of cotton fluff and pubic hair across the bare floor boards.
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