“I’m not a morning person,” I say.
“Joe, you’re barely an afternoon person.”
“Sorry. I haven’t established a routine yet. The move and everything.”
She tuts thoughtfully.
“I’m beginning to think you’re making up for lost years. Your poor liver.”
“I want to be drunk,” I reply without meaning to. “When I sleep, then sometimes I see him again.”
“Your father?”
We’ve discussed this.
“Yeah,” I say.
There follows an unhealthy silence encouraging me to sit up, sip the coffee and then slouch towards Bethlehem by way of the mismatched kitchen table set across from the loo. Not having had any visitors yet apart from Tessa, the conflicting smells and lack of privacy haven’t been an issue. It’s all new, Loren tells me, because we’re in love. I say nothing and now it feels like she’s playing me at my own game.
“I guess I should be looking for work,” I say, not because I mean it, but because I figure it’s expected.
Loren makes the sort of noise only she reserves for when I’ve made precisely the wrong call and instantly and comprehensively sees through my words and actions to a detailed chromatographic account of the inspiration behind it, laying my base motives bare. It only makes me hang my head further, closing my eyes to stop the wood grain of the compressed pine tabletop swimming before me.
When I open my eyes, she’s gone.
Eventually, my headache recedes a notch.
*
IT TAKES A while for the mind trick to work, but Sting materializes over my sofa with a put-upon expression that doesn’t completely work on his determinedly handsome features. He steps down from the nimbus of white light to remind me he’s just an astral projection stepped straight from a Benetton catalogue.
“Hey, Zephyr. I thought I said that signal was for emergencies?”
“It is an emergency,” I tell him. “Who’s Roxanne, anyway?”
“Never mind. What is it? I scanned the area from London and I can’t discern any threats except perhaps the bacteria in your bathroom.”
“I need your help,” I say.
“I’m happy to help. Can we skip the exposition though, please? I’m actually having tantric sex with Princess Eugenie at the moment and I need to pop back in before she breaches her fourth chakra.”
He says this, matter-of-fact as you or I would describe the contents of a toaster. I’m not sure whether this disposes me better or worse to the flagrant Englishman, but he winks like I’m in on a joke, so I forge madly ahead.
“I’ve lost my powers. Had them drained. Or something,” I say. “I thought you could help.”
“Me?”
“Well, you’ve been in my brain before. You know the layout.”
The psychic hologram puts his finger to his chin and walks slowly around the open plan of the Van Buren apartment. I’m glad Loren isn’t here to see it, which is of course how I planned it.
“From what I can sense, you’re mentally intact. Possibly more together, in fact.” Sting shrugs eloquently. “I’m not sure I can help you, mate. Sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“Relax. I’m a big believer in synchronicity, Zeph. Just relax. The universe is a beautiful thing and she moves in mysterious ways.”
“Synchronicity.”
“Yeah. Things, sometimes, they’re just meant to be.”
“You know, the smug and unaffected way you say that makes me want to smash your face in,” I mutter.
“Yeah. But you can’t, can you?”
He tilts his head on an angle and smirks.
“Sorry mate. I’d love to help, but I don’t know what I’m meant to do. I could ream your brain, dissect your psyche over the next month and put you back together again. Who knows what we might find? But from what I am seeing now, there’s nothing I can do to free any trapped brain functions restricting your powers.
“How’d it happen?”
I mutter something along the lines of “my mother’s killer’s kids ambushed me” and Sting only raises his eyebrows and nods.
“Well, hope you’re back on deck soon, old man. We’re still waiting to hear what you’re going to do next.”
I don’t watch to see him go. The light bulb glow withdraws from the room behind me and I know he has gone. Only the smugness seems to linger like a psychic stain.
“I didn’t ask you,” I say aloud, knowing full well there is no point.
The same logic hasn’t stopped me breathing yet.
“Who’s Elvis?”
Zephyr 7.12 “Devil’s Advocate”
I TUCK THE letter from the magazine editor into the couch as Loren comes up the fire escape looking tired and lovely, the silver eye-liner a glimmer in the half-moonlight. She pauses in the doorway, one hand above her head to rest her weight against the frame and she smiles and the nights must be getting warmer because her arms are bare and I think it’s almost two weeks now we’ve been in the warehouse. It is 2am and the broken radio is playing jazz and it is Saturday night, the sound of bottles breaking in time to the percussion leaking from the transistor’s tinny speakers.
“Hey,” Loren says and smiles and rests her head against her raised arm, hair like gossamer the color of a moth’s wing with the streetlight somewhere behind it.
“Hey babe,” I say and smile and stand from the couch wearing only jeans and an open cowboy shirt we bought at a recycling boutique on Rye Street the day before.
It is cold in the loft without any heating, though Loren’s also wearing only a singlet and Estefan jeans and knee-high Eskimo boots by Larry Paul.
“Ready for our date?”
I smile, strangely warm, almost sentimental to this tall, curvaceous and misguided woman who has taken me as her own. I’m as intrigued as when she made the mysterious comment before heading off to her shift at the Wild Horses. Now I watch as she makes the visible effort to throw off her tiredness, stepping into the apartment with renewed vigor.
“You’re not dressed,” she says and sashays past me and throws her things down in front of the sofa.
“I guess not,” I reply. “I was sort of waiting for you. Following your lead. We going to a club? The Break might be in lock-in by now.”
Loren is in the kitchen and then returns to the main room and peels off her vest in something close to glorious slow motion.
“Not going to The Break,” she says and moves around the other side to the dilapidated wardrobe, her back to me, no tan lines, hair brushing the delicate grooves in the small of her spine. She pulls the leather coat and everything else dangling from the hanger and throws them onto the bed.
“Put this on,” Loren says.
She gives a coy look over her shoulder, suddenly the exotic dancer again with her hand and forearm cupping her breasts and a wink before turning away and pulling her own maroon leather costume free of the closet.
I look at the leather gear and feel strangely lifeless for a man whose heart is galloping at a hundred miles per hour. It’s only a couple of steps and then I have the ballistic vest in my hands, slowly bending the dark grey material.
Loren kicks off her boots one at a time. She shucks down to a black thong as I stand undecided. When I break free of my coma, she is pulling her hair back from the dark red leather bodice and slipping the face mask into place.
“Did you think of a name yet?”
*
SO WE STUDY the photos Loren has taken and then we slip downstairs like ring-wraiths and remove the plates from the Triumph and I am astounded they speak so openly about their business in the club, but as Loren assures me, the other dancers aren’t exactly held in high regard and the drug dealers almost seek validation by being so open before the girls. The throttle on the chopper is loud and entirely pleasant in what I would hesitate to call the balmy evening, the leather coat sticking to the inside of my arms, and I’m glad I followed Loren’s advice, foregoing the jacket beneath the coat and simply we
aring the vest over a black tee, arms cut off, the weight of the metal in my gloves and sewn like chainmail into the knees of my leather strides almost as comforting as the indecorous baseball bat strapped between my shoulder blades. Loren – Lioness, I should say – holds on to my hips and lets me ride even though she says her daddy was letting her ride these things when she was eleven or twelve and we glide like true night creatures through the clearing, post-Witching Hour streets and briefly collect a police tail we lose just as swiftly among the junk-strewn alleys of the waterfront as we narrow ever closer to MacGeraghty’s Bar.
Minutes from the rendezvous, Loren rests her head against the upper part of my back, cheek to the black leather, and I can hear her words through the vibrations of my spine and into my chest.
“This is for you, Joe. Please. This is for you.”
The metal across my knuckles tighten as I open the throttle and we roar along the pier and then turn back into the network of run-down streets perilously close to where we now call home, two creatures of Fairyland patrolling the night, but still lost in the day-lit world all the same.
*
ON THE BED, arched back after great sex, the roach smoldering between thumb and forefinger, I laugh again and Loren, sitting demurely with the sex-stained bedcovers against her chest, continues to survey my expression for any betrayal of remorse.
“It doesn’t work,” she says, far too serious.
“I’m Batsman,” I repeat.
“It doesn’t work.”
“I have a baseball bat. You saw that, I think.”
“Shame the other guy didn’t,” Loren replies. “But we call them batters. Is it a cricket bat? No.”
“Okay,” I say and laugh, amused at the ease of my torture. “How about . . . Night . . . Master.”
“That’s a little B&D.”
“Night . . . hunter.”
“Isn’t there a Nighthunter already?”
“Not sure supers from Salt Lake City count.”
“I like Marauder,” she says with special emphasis on the name.
“Isn’t that what bad people do?”
“You can be bad,” Loren laughs.
“Only for you.”
“Others, then?”
“I’ll have to sleep on it. What’s the time? Is that the sun?”
“Don’t ask,” she says and I drop the joint into the ashtray and exhale the last of the smoke. “You always want me to play devil’s advocate.”
“Do I?”
“You do.”
“That’s good,” I tell her.
“Actually, it sucks.”
“No, the name,” I say and then say it again. “Devil’s Advocate.”
I can hear her running it over in her mind.
“Long,” she says. “I’m not sure you can do that. Two words?”
“Sure. Why not?”
A pause. “What about the baseball bat?”
“I’m keeping the baseball bat.”
I roll over and glance toward the grey skyline over the water which I can’t actually see from this angle, just the big container ships and the distant spires of the wharves. Although most the port noises are banned these days, there’s still the occasional horn and one sounds now, low like the lowing of some huge celestial calf, and I take Loren by the sweet flesh of her upper arm and pull her back into the bed with me. She tastes like a piece of fruit.
Later, Loren asks, “Was that good?”
“The best, baby,” I reply.
As we trundle off to sleep, the thought occurs to me I’m not sure what the question was, though the answer remains true all the same.
Zephyr 7.13 “A Few Layers Of Skin”
THE CROWD IS thicker than any dirty-assed strip club has a right to boast, but I pay my five dollars to see my own girlfriend naked and move across the sticky floor to a tall round table I share awkwardly with some guy apparently called Travis because that’s the name on his dingy grey shirt. On the poorly-lit stage, some country girl is flashing her pimply chest and getting her leg over the black-and-yellow striped bollards with safety lights on them that I can’t tell if they are part of the set design or the stage itself has just been condemned as an occupational hazard. The crowd, not entirely guys, but scarce for good-looking women, is edgy and impatient and when Loren steps out from behind the right stage curtain my worst fears are confirmed as some of the dudes cheer, revealing themselves as repeat offenders.
Perhaps it’s only me who can detect the uncertainty in Loren’s routine. She knows how to use the pole and grabs onto it early like a good friend in a storm as she gently loses her cowboy girl vest and britches, tipping back the big white hat and causing her thick, honey-colored braid to swing like there should be a noose attached under the capsicum-hued light. Her light brown eyes glide over me like I’m any other punter and then return, the corner of her mouth upturned in a knowing smirk I swear to Christ I’ve never seen before and an aquarium of live eel turn over in my stomach as my cock hardens and I curse under my breath and shake my head, an ironic laugh not far away, but something I’m not quite able to conjure.
This is a tasteful establishment or maybe it’s just when you look as good as she does and you decide you’ll settle for twelve bucks an hour for showing your girlie bits to strangers, management isn’t going to argue that she ends the act cavorting around the pole causing heads to spin, but with her pink thong still intact. A back bend and a slow reverse somersault and one final twirl, a double-jointed show for the audience and then a demure wave and Loren’s gone, the men around me drawing slow retarded lungfuls of air smoky with the perfume reek of the club and each other’s aspirations. The guy in the shirt turns to me and nods, the expression slow and abusive as his hand smooths across his stomach and I decline the urge to stab my fingers into the first five or six pressure points that present themselves.
Instead, a doorman the size of a small Micronesian atoll taps me on the shoulder and indicates the unseen door to the backstage area. To the envy of the other punters, I pull the dark curtain aside and descend the metal catwalk to the subterranean offices of the dancers, brightly-lit cubicles beneath the stage with little padding to prevent them being the Kafkaesque metaphor they appear. A girl with a blue Mohawk covers herself as I pass and then I am easing into Loren’s booth with a downcast smile.
“I can’t stand this,” I say to her, again, nothing rehearsed in my demeanor or delivery, just raw emotion I’m not accustomed to letting free.
She has already slipped into the second-hand kimono she keeps for between shows, the white of the cowboy hat emphasizing the near invisible spray of freckles across her tan face, the one tiny chip of imperfection in her farm-girl front teeth.
“Joe. . . .”
“I’m serious. Please, Loren. This is busting me up inside.”
“I seriously doubt that,” she replies.
“Fuck. Are you turning into my ex-wife already? I mean it, God damn.”
The passion speaks volumes, the thump of the sound system overhead momentarily relegated. Loren pauses and examines me like any predator-shy fauna might when something big and dumb and noisy stumbles into the rainforest.
“So what do you want me to do?” she asks. “Quit?”
“Desperately.”
“You’ve got enough for the rent?”
I don’t say anything. I owe Tessa twenty dollars. The silence decides for us and a shadow passes the door and a smaller, shaven-headed guy with fake Celtic tattoos on the side of his skull is there, saliva spraying as he grabs me by the collar.
“You want a fucken blowjob, you can meet up in the alley outside, alright cocksucker?” he bawls in a blighted Cockney accent and I spin about and grab the door frame of the small booth and look back at Loren and imperceptibly she shakes her head and I gasp a sigh and allow myself to be escorted out, a few less people on the floor of the club, the man-mountain from before now looking away.
It is cold in the street. An ambulance is across the road with tw
o tired women in uniform dealing with a man with a cut hand and clown make-up on and a t-shirt that reads IF I WASN’T GAY YOU’D TOTALLY BE MINE. Without the sirens wailing, the emergency light bathes the street in a strange, rotating calm at the same time as the kebab shop pulls down its shutters and a hooker in a fake leopard-skin coat swaps promises for a hot pretzel from a Sikh guy with a little white van.
In the doorway of the Wild Horses, the agro doorman glares at me and his piercings jingle as he turns and strides back with a midget’s gait into the club and two more doormen in black who I know are carrying Glocks simply let their eyes glide over me and I mentally check where their gear is stashed before I return to the bike and then home.
*
ON MONDAY WE roust a bunch of no hopers making the old brewery their own, crashing in on the bike and dodging fire from one of those automatic shotgun thingies. I put three guys in traction and nearly fatally disembowel another and then I dance like Joe DiMaggio to the sound of cracking skulls. Loren as Lioness is no slouch either and we only hear the sirens once the breaking glass stops.
Tuesday night sees us dropping through the skylight of a clandestine drug den on Opal and Hay, the tribal tattoos of the punks at the long, powder-covered tables doing little to paper over the fact these are borderline child molesters, peddling drugs to kids and the city’s desperate, an ugly feral quotient to the already ramping crime rate in the poor quarter. Loren catches a guy by the wrist just a split-second before he opens her up with a serrated combat knife and the look of violent intensity on her face mirrors the passion we share on our broken bed in the evenings so much so that I give a great yell as she puts her elbow into the guy’s throat and collapses his windpipe and we simply watch him squirming on the ground until one of his buddies scurries over to give mouth-to-mouth.
A day later and we follow up more info from the strip club on a suspected pedophile lurking in a basement apartment near the Kidz Klub daycare on Horowitz and Rye. There’s plenty in the serpentine hovel to suggest guilt, so we torch the place and tie him to a streetlamp naked and it’s only the do-gooders from the Hare Krishna soup kitchen who save him a few layers of skin. The morning TV leads with the blaze and I sulk in the shadows, in civilian guise that owes more to St Vincent de Paul than Armani and watch Imogen Davies take three tries to nail her so-called live cross. After quick sex at home, Loren heads off to the club and I take to the rooftops, forsaking the Triumph as I roust a mugger with a needle filled with HIV and later break the thumbs of a junkie dealer outside the Sip-and-Save. It’ll be a while till he can shoot up by himself.
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