“I don’t think I can do school any more,” she says eventually and takes a drink.
“Your grandmothers paid for that school,” I reply. “Paid up to your graduation in advance.”
“Well, one grandmother is dead and the other was some kind of make believe, so I’m not sure I put much stock in their opinions,” Tessa says.
“You’ve lied to everyone,” I say and don’t look at her in case she decides to bolt. “That really surprises me.”
“What, that I can lie? You shouldn’t be. Surprised.”
“No, I’m just surprised that you’d lie to me.”
“Yeah, well, it looks like we don’t even have our powers in common any more,” she says. “Thanks for Christmas, by the way. That was just awesome.”
The lack of empathy stings and I put the cup down as an advertisement plays showing Johnny Depp with a Hawaiian guitar while Olga Kurylenko and Stiletto do wiggly dances. The news break cuts to shots of the Indonesian president meeting a bunch of white diplomats with lots of kissing and hugging.
“You’re angry about Seeker.”
“I’m angry I had to hear about it on E! Online, dad.”
“Honey, the time’s going to come when even your mother is probably going to wind up with someone else too.”
“Jesus, dad. Get with it. She’s only been shacked up with her boss since about five minutes after she divorced your sorry ass.”
The words desert me as I drink that one in and then Tessa betrays her intentions by peeking across to see if she scored a direct hit. I am astonished, not just by the news of my recently ex-wife, but the sudden rich vein of sadism in my world.
“Fuck, Tessa. What’s got into you?”
“Not you. That’s what little miss Seeker was worried about, wasn’t she?”
“She knows all about me and Windsong now,” I reply.
“Great, dad. You can’t just make a fuck-storm of your own secret identity, you have to go and trash mine,” Tessa says and stares away fuming.
“When your school called, I had to explain.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t understand what’s gotten into you,” I say again and I am listening to myself, and frustration aside, this isn’t how I am used to these things panning out. I can only dig myself in further.
“Tessa,” I say and at least manage to get her looking my way. “Baby, you’re really scaring me. My life’s going down the shit-hole and the least I could hope is I don’t trash things with you too. I need to know what’s made you so angry. Is it really about her?”
“You could’ve, you know, waited,” she says, and begins to break up. “Both of you. Have you ever even met that guy, Harald? I mean he’s fucking Norwegian, dad. How am I meant to even talk to a Norwegian guy?”
“I don’t know, honey,” I manage to mumble. “It could be an opportunity to learn another language. . . .”
“Oh what, while I’m in England?”
Tessa is standing before I know it and the windows in the bedroom must be open because suddenly wind is pouring through the room and books are falling from their shelves and magazines and CD cases come scurrying around the room and Tessa squeezes her fists as she stares down at me and her hair explodes backwards as the zephyr gathers like a fist and smashes me into the chair and wall against which I’m sitting. The pane above me cracks and the fluttering of a thousand different loose things abates and my daughter turns her back and storms off into the kitchen and I find her there five minutes later smoking the joint the Goth model was rolling.
“You shouldn’t be smoking that shit,” I say and step in and take it from her and blow on the tip to clear some of the clumsily-rolled paper from the end and then I take a deeper toke and close my eyes, my ribs aching from my daughter’s unique way of expressing her frustrations.
“I’m sorry I hit you, dad.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t take it.”
“Your powers . . . they’ll come back, right?”
“I dunno, baby.”
We are silent for a minute and I think what the hell and hand her the joint and she smokes it with a thankful lack of skill and then offers it back and the weed is hitting me like I can only remember from a few weeks of junior high before my own powers began and I rock back on my heels with the release of breath.
“I sometimes wish my powers would disappear too,” Tessa says.
“I never felt that way. Don’t know why.”
“It was easy for you,” Tessa says. “I don’t think you ever aspired to anything else.”
“Sheesh. Listen to you, Dr Phil.”
“Well it’s true, isn’t it?”
I turn back to her and toss the roach into the grungy sink.
“You better clean this place up before your ma gets home.”
“I will.”
“It was easy for me because I had my powers and I had your mom and then I had you, all by the time I was twenty,” I tell Tessa. “What more could a guy want?”
“I think you always wanted more. You just didn’t know what it was.”
“You just said I never aspired to much,” I answer her back and grin.
“Doesn’t mean you can’t want for things though, does it? Things you can’t even name?”
I sigh and feel the gunja throb through me.
“Probably not.”
“Are you gonna let me meet her?”
“Who?”
“Seeker.”
“She’s not Seeker any more,” I say. “But yeah. Pack your things. You’re staying with your deadbeat dad tonight.”
“Finally,” Tessa says and moves off, feigning bored excitement. “I get to be like every other teenager.”
Zephyr 7.10 “Still Dreaming”
IT IS AFTER dark and we wait for Loren at a table at the Vietnamese place and we order duck and curry chai and honey pork and Loren is late, coming in out of the golden rain beneath the lamp post and into the bustling plastic-chaired restaurant where the waiters wear white industrial gum boots to their knees and everything has been hosed down. She is wearing silver eye shadow and more make-up than I’m accustomed to, but she looks bright and beautiful and possibly too young for me as I introduce the two women in my life and Loren winces at Tessa’s handshake and then they sit, one either side across from me.
“I’m sorry about our misunderstanding,” Loren says at the outset.
“Hey, don’t mention it,” Tessa says. “I always wanted to see Rome.”
“I know this is sudden, meeting me like this,” Loren answers. “Things have been changing awfully fast for a lot of us.”
“Don’t worry. I’m used to dad screwing anything in lycra with boobs.”
“Honey –”
“I’m just shitting you, dad. Sorry, Loren,” Tessa says, not really entirely contrite and mischievous, suddenly a shorter, curvier reminder of the girl her mother once was.
Tessa tugs down her own wool cap and slurps the achingly hot chili soup from her meal and dabs at the bowl with VN bread and I order a Coke and Loren tries to catch my eye and smiles when she does.
“I got your dad a surprise,” she says to Tessa when we’re done.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Are you coming back?”
“He’s making me,” Tessa replies.
“I’m actually just obeying the law,” I say and make to cuff her over the back of the head and she doesn’t exactly laugh, but we get along on the short walk around the block and up the outside stairs.
I have hardly noticed the big brown paper bag Loren has been lugging and by the glow of the Budweiser sign and our dingy bed lamp she empties the sack onto the end of the futon and at first I think she’s just purloined an early version of my Zephyr costume, only the leather coat is an open number and there is a Kevlar vest and what are indeed a pair of my leather pants and some other items and I pick up a long black bandanna and eye Loren suspiciously.
“I thought you could tie it like this,” she says and moves behin
d me and I only consent because I am astonished to see Tessa giggling as the traditional Zorro mask is bound around my face, leaving my eyes free.
“Aw, dad. . . .”
“What’s this?”
“Haven’t you been thinking about it?” she asks.
“Um, well. . . .”
“You’ll have to think of a new name,” Loren whispers into my ear and then kisses my cheek and steps back and I look suitably badass if not a little homosexual in the bar mirror that was bolted to the wall before we even moved in here.
“Wow, the gay avenger,” Tessa says from the side.
“Thanks honey. Very supportive.”
“Well, sorry Tessa, you might want to cover your ears or something,” Loren says with another wink, “but I think he looks hot.”
“You’ve already shown you’ve got a weak spot for dudes in leather,” Tessa replies.
“Guilty as charged,” Loren laughs.
“What’s the rest of this stuff?” I ask and start turning over the various items.
“Ballistic vest with Gore-tech stab-proof lining, Kevlar thigh guards, and um, cup. Leather pants. The trench coat is kind of Matrix, I thought.”
“I hated Tom Cruise in that,” Tessa says from the side.
“Boots?”
“Well, your own,” Loren says. “I was careful, buying all these. No one can trace these items back to you or me.”
I nod and lean over and peer at a business card amid the clothing I pick up and read, the image of a woman naked from the back always going to pique my interest. The card is for a local strip club and the reverse is bare except for a cell number written in pen.
“What’s this?” I ask.
Loren sets her chin and I can feel Tessa tense and retreat.
“That’s the other thing I was going to tell you about,” she says.
“I got a job.”
*
AN HOUR OR two into my sleep I sit up aware I am still dreaming because John Lennon is at the foot of my bed.
“How did you get here?” seems like a sensible thing to ask until it is out of my mouth, or at least that’s how the dream goes.
“I’ve been with you a long time, Joe,” Lennon says and turns so he’s looking more at me and he smiles, just softly, nothing but benevolence in his eyes shielded behind small round sunglasses.
“Are you really John Lennon?”
“One and the same. Are you really Zephyr?”
“I’m not sure of that any more.”
“And are you really my son?” he asks in that stark, almost countrified accent of his, famous from old footage.
There’s a beat.
“That’s what they tell me,” I say.
“You need to stay strong, Joseph.”
“What does that mean, in this, um, context?”
“You mean because you’re dreaming?”
“Well, yeah.”
“It means you’re my little secret weapon, Joey-boy.”
“That’s what the Demoness said. Spectra. Yoko Ono.”
“Ah, you can’t believe that lying tart.”
“But she’s your woman,” I say.
“Only in this world,” Lennon answers.
“Can you . . . tell me what’s going on?”
“There’s a key to understanding all of this,” Lennon says. “Sorry, pal, that I can’t tell you more now. I see everything you do and everything you think. But the walls are too strong for me to help you. I’m sorry.”
“Where . . . are you?”
“Elvis is the key,” Lennon says and stares down the bed at me quite seriously. “Find Elvis, son. Then everything else will fall into place. The world’s not the place it’s meant to be. Find the King.”
I am still frowning at this last bit of eloquence when I wake up with a start, perhaps because Loren’s arm is across my face or perhaps because Tessa is gently snoring on the couch we fixed up with about a dozen blankets. The night is still and calm and a fog is easing up from the river and somewhere a ship or perhaps a dirigible is sounding its horn, but I don’t notice any of that. My mind is turning over the one question again and again, not quite believing I am asking it, let alone having a hard time wondering about the answer.
Who the hell is Elvis?
Zephyr 7.11 “Psychic Stain”
IT IS COLD among the little people as I stagger from one shop doorway to another with the breath escaping my lungs as gasps of smoke like I’ve imbibed some dragon and not a half-bottle of Jacks and whatever the pills from the guy outside the discount liquor barn was trading. The bottle is jammed into the pocket of my anorak, but the drugs have dissolved into nothingness, spores invading my brain and entrancing neural pathways gelatinous with a temporary disease, an artful malfunction, a deliberate, self-imposed disability that brings pleasure and release and respite and sees me staring hollow-eyed into the reflective glass windows of the pawnbrokers on Rye, the people spilling from the adult megaplex, the teenage girls smoking, cold-eyed, cum in their stomachs and their purses full of twenties as they shop disconsolately along the Bohemian avenue that is Tingle and Lomax, downtown Van Buren a broken palace, the regurgitation of a mall’s contents onto the street, the architecture now topsy-turvy, inside-out without any artistic design, an urban topography like Escher though with none of the clever illusions except the where kids seem to be always shopping and getting high.
The store alarm bell has been ringing since before the world was born, but it only comes into my consciousness as the people around me jostle and flee the footpath as the young black male offender makes like a streak towards me. Frankly, my mind is a blur already, but so too is the scene, a vague awareness a woman in bondage attire is shaking an umbrella from the neon-lit entrance to some peccadillo parlor, her make-up thick as a clown might wear it, nose wet from where the drugs have caused a black and nightmarish cavity.
“Stop! Thief!”
I don’t think. Were I to stop and think, you’d be reading someone else’s confessional. The words, fresh from the shopkeep junkie’s mouth, resound within the racial memory of my superhero forebears and I step, pushing off from the cold bricks, and swing my left arm around as the boy passes, his eyes more behind him than upon me, and even without my blessed powers the arm is like a gorilla’s in his path and it takes him just under the throat and he flips, landing back hard on the concrete and I push the lip of the bottle back deep into my pocket and clench my fist and prepare to bust some poor ignorant opportune ass, except the kid doesn’t get up and instead lies there twitching with his eyes flickering like he’s in the electric chair.
A fat man with kind eyes and a t-shirt that reads WHAT NEXT MOTHERFUCKER? pushes me back with concern and a space clears around the boy, stick-thin shoplifted European girls spilling from the pages beneath his Quiksilver hoodie. I am an island of ill intent among the sudden moshpit of Samaritans and I let myself be buffeted by their anxious gestures until I find I am halfway down the block, the X-rated cinema and porno shop forgotten, my vision blurred as I tug the booze from my coat and stare back at the small crowd as phone calls are made and Facebook is updated and insightful tweets are spawned in the ether around us and no wonder genetic freaks are hiding out in the ruins of Manhattan like fairytale trolls, the unseen true wonders of the postmodern, all that shit in the air messing with our chromosomes.
The bottle slips from my fingers and explodes like a grenade on the footpath and nobody looks, the sound just a crescendo in the obscure Philip Glass score of the scene that now awaits my exit.
I am ill enough to vomit and perversely thrilled at the prospect until it happens and then I slide down the shuddering security grille of the discount jewelers and hug myself through the cold arms of my overcoat and think about the double-edged sword of my apparent misfortune.
*
THERE IS AN angel saying something I can’t quite fathom, just to the edge of my dreams of burning cities filled with children and sinewy black monsters pushing me from those burning he
ights to a nightmare of perpetual descent.
It takes Loren’s rough shaking to turn me over on the sofa, a crust of what I assume to be drool leaking from my mouth like from a wound. I am fresh from the trenches and Loren is my nurse Nightingale, though her delightfully knitted brow radiates more frustration than tender sympathy for my plight.
“Joe, it’s two in the afternoon,” she says when I fail to say anything after several minutes, eyes open and tracking the lazy progress of a butterfly that has somehow entered the apartment through the gap in the windows.
In my mind, my reply is gallant, playful. It emerges as a traffic jam of malformed vowels, the linguistic equivalent of a mini-bus accident full of children from the special school. In my limited experiences, the retarded kid is the happiest one on the bus, but now I find myself resembling one I am too concerned with the diabolical state of my stomach to appreciate the irony.
I manage to get to the loft apartment’s tastefully open plan, open plumbing bathroom before the heave brings forth the fossil record of my last twenty-four hours rendered in protoplasm and colonic bile in orgiastic proportions. Loren winces from the bed and delicately turns away, a lady returning to her needle-work, perhaps, though more likely she is using her embroidered kerchief to wash her hands of me. I kneel gasping with my temple against the cold bowl and after a while my angel returns with a lukewarm coffee she offers in the spirit of Thanksgiving, her pilgrim, me dumb native.
“Drinking again?”
“Not much to do when you’re not around,” I sluggishly reply.
“If we both worked nights, we’d have the days to ourselves.”
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