“I saw it through your eyes. I’ve seen everything, Joe. Sorry. But spare a thought for me, trapped in here. It was never meant to be like that.”
“What were you . . . What were you doing? You said you were under attack?”
“The Editors. Lennon. They just called him Preacher in that other universe, the shadow one to ours. He was a bastard. I mean, I was a right bastard at times, not the least to your mother, Joe. And the other girls. Lord, God knows, I’ve had long enough to dwell on it all. I’m sorry, but I –”
“Please,” I cut in on him. The door splits a little more. “The attack?”
“Lennon and the Editors made a pact in subspace.”
“Subspace.” It’s barely a question.
“It’s where they live.”
“Go on.”
“I’m not sure what he was up to. We’re . . . different. But they collapsed our worlds at the quantum level. Overwrote us, I guess you’d say.”
“Cut and . . . paste,” I say listlessly.
“The others had a way out, but on the island, there was no time for me to get to Strummer’s Morris-Thorne wormhole and so, well, I thought you would be strong, Joey. Strong.”
“Strong.”
“I didn’t want to be replaced. The others got out, the 101ers, the Goodies and that. I think they even took the King. But I couldn’t. I’m sorry, Joseph. At the last minute, I made the leap. The maharishi showed me how, but I’d never tried before. I left it all behind.”
“Your body,” I say numbly.
“Yes. And the women.”
Lennon starts to cry and it’s about that moment the door splits completely asunder and a squamous, mustard green squid tentacle pours flaccidly into the room, filling the dream space and making the single globe explode.
Zephyr 9.4 “The Tentacular Nightmare”
THE TENTACULAR NIGHTMARE resolves itself into Siren and the scene changes accordingly. We are on a British beach covered in stones and dead penguins. There are people in the distance, doing seaside things near the skeletal boardwalk towering like some medieval contraption covered in circussy barnacles over the beach-front, but they seem unreal – or perhaps I should say even less real, given our dreamy locale.
It is cold and there is a wind. Winter. My father stands a few feet away in a tattered white suit with a black wool scarf, his middle age restored. Siren triangulates our position, a thin, ectopic figure with her jet black hair splayed across the flowering open white collar of her jumpsuit. She has the demeanor of a not-too-happy schoolmarm, one arm crossed beneath her elbow and the other hand clasping her chin as she looks disapprovingly sideways at us both.
“What?” I say.
“You’re full of surprises, aren’t you, Zephyr?”
“It’s not me.”
“Did you know he was in here?”
She cocks her thumb as if John Lennon is just a naughty child who can’t really understand what’s being said.
“No idea.”
“You’re also missing some memories,” Siren says.
“I am?”
“Yeah. About six days. Do you want them back?”
“I think so. It depends. Is it because of him?” and I point, joining the game now.
“I don’t think so. It’ll explain why you can’t remember punching out Negator, though,” she says.
I mull this over a second and the FBI agent continues.
“You know they will want to question him.”
“He’s in my head.”
“He’s a known felon.”
“No,” I say. “No, he’s not. This isn’t the Doomsday-Man-Lennon. This is the Preacher Man. A parallel.” Siren looks skeptical, so I add, “The Mirror Act doesn’t allow this, surely? It’s my head. I don’t have to host any damned third-party interrogation session if I don’t want to.”
“Oh, that’s not the problem,” Siren says dismissively. “Lucky for you we can get him out. A few hours at White Nine and we can get a digital replicate. Our technology’s come a long way. Hell, find a host body and we can give life into Johnny Frankenstein over there.”
“I’m listening, you know,” Lennon says.
I stare at him a few seconds, disconnected, disconsolate, not really knowing now what the fuck is going on. Siren’s hardass act shatters and she smirks like a schoolgirl and Lennon’s face softens, the smooth bastard, and that lifts me from my doldrums long enough to be annoyed.
“Fucking hell, old man. You’re still in my head, you know. Keep it in your pants.”
“What’s the matter, Joe?” Lennon says and smiles and walks closer. “She not your type? No red bathing suit?”
I look away, mutter and swear, and Siren titters and I feel myself getting sleepy, which is a shame, as there’s still so many answers and I’m yet to work out the questions.
*
I SLEEP FOR about a day-and-a-half, wiped out by Siren’s mental incursion and the sedatives, and while White Nine’s not exactly a hotel, they do manage to find me a three-course breakfast some time around noon when I wake. I am sitting back, barefoot in my moldering costume on the clinical white bed, sheets loose, when Siren and Tempo walk in and the female agent seems sufficiently comfortable to sit on the edge of the bed as I contemplate a cigarette though I haven’t had one in a few years.
“Well?”
“What?” I snap back.
“Is it all coming back to you now?”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“Zephyr, we’ve got you dead to rights. Common assault. Threats.”
“Negator’s got a rap sheet as long as my cock,” I tell her.
“A bit longer than that, Zephyr. Don’t fool yourself. I had to help move you, don’t forget.”
“I knew you couldn’t resist a feel.”
“I’d fancy you if you put Lennon behind the wheel,” she says and smirks.
“This isn’t Being John Malkovich.”
“Well, we could arrange that too.”
“I think you’re here to cut a deal. Get on with it.”
Siren looks like she’s about to say something, but Tempo looks gruff and she sighs and flicks away a comma of hair. I spent the break trying to remember her real first name and can’t. Valerie? I have the brief urge to pass wind and refrain, mindful that it’s pretty damned turgid in here already.
“We want access to Lennon. There’s a lot of unanswered questions,” she says. “And we want you to keep him in there.”
“What?”
“If what you’ve said is true, your mind has been a pretty efficient prison for him for thirty-something years,” Siren says. “If that’s true, we’re thinking, you know, if it ain’t broke, we don’t want to have to clean up the puke, you know?”
“I’m not following you.”
“Well, you said this isn’t the Doomsday Man.”
“No. It’s his parallel. Or rather, I think the other Lennon is the parallel and this one – my one – is our world’s original.”
“Either way, he’s got the potential to be what we like to call an omega-level threat.”
“We like to call ‘em that, but there’s no actual classification for that sort of thing,” Tempo says from the side.
“That means he’s safer kept in the box till we know what to do with him. You understand?” Siren asks.
“Yeah.”
“So, deal?”
“I didn’t really think I had any other choice anyway,” I say.
I contemplate the linoleum for a few moments, trying to imagine that the old man is listening to every word we say and sucking up my psychic reactions like a baby in the amniotic sac, filtering every libidinal and unconscious twitter. But despite the knowledge he’s in there, he might as well be a million miles away. Things don’t feel any different than before even with what I’ve been told. It’s almost hard to believe. Like a dream. I bow my head, curiously unafraid the potential barrel-load of phobias pursuant to this idea have slid off me like from a Teflon frying pan. When I lift
my face again, I have my patented Zephyr smirk in place even as I realize I’ve been sitting here the whole while with my mask next to my boots.
“Okay,” I say. “Deal.”
Siren nods, pleased like she’s just negotiated a high-powered contract with some interdimensional zaibatsu. Tempo grunts a farewell and they depart from the room and at the door Siren pauses and throws me the phone they confiscated.
“Just press the buzzer when you’re ready to see your woman.”
I nod and they leave and an eerie stillness descends upon the cubicle.
Good going, Joey-boy, my father’s voice sounds disturbingly close in my mind. Just don’t let on that the Jack is out of the box, eh?
I stare straight ahead and try not to think about Pamela Anderson.
Zephyr 9.5 “Witness”
I HAVE THE phone in my hand and my father’s voice in my ear. I feel like a little kid too afraid to pee with other people watching.
What’s the matter, Joey?
“I can hear you,” I mutter.
That’s right, lad. You’re doing great.
“Is this because of what she did, Siren?”
I’m not sure she realized.
I don’t say anything for a moment. Instead, I stand and finish dressing. My costume smells of cheese and my hand of ass. There’s a wash basin and I try and rectify the situation and end up gulping freezing mouthfuls with my head turned sideways under the faucet like the cold water is a metal dish to protect my thoughts from the internal telepath I’ve apparently hosted most my life.
Hehe, don’t feel bad, Joey. It’s okay. I’m cool. I’m just happy to be, you know, a little closer to free.
“We might have to do something about that too,” I say softly. “I’m not sure how much longer I can take living with that fucking accent.”
Lennon snickers in my head and I fight off a wave of tiredness and sit on the edge of the bed, roughing up my face like a witness who might offer any answers to my current predicament. I think about my mom, possibly still out there somewhere, an intra-dimensional flunky dead in her place. It’s all just a distraction from the phone in my hand. It’s not like I don’t care – that I’m not thrilled to think perhaps I was right all along and somehow there’s a rational explanation to what happened at my parents’ house all those weeks ago – but the cold resonance of logic that tells me I am not imagining the grim reality of death, whosever it was, sits still as the Reaper himself in my thoughts. It’s almost enough to make my jumpiness about my father being perched on my shoulder like a psychic parrot retreat. Before I know what I have done I’ve pressed the button and the White Nine telecom snaps up the signal.
“Yes Zephyr, how can we help you?” comes a woman’s voice.
“I’m ready to see Lioness.”
“Someone will be along shortly.”
I disengage. The palpable sense of not being alone returns, distilling my silence with something somewhere in-between a scent and a flavor, or perhaps outside that sensory range entirely.
“What is it, dad?”
I’m happy.
“You are?”
Thirty years, Joey-boy. Thirty years.
“And now what?”
We make things right.
“You know, Ono tried to kill me.”
No, lad. She saved you.
“That’s not how it seemed at the time,” I say.
I know, but trust me. Spectra couldn’t harm you even if she tried. I made certain of that, in the final stages before my . . . departure. A psychic suggestion, to watch over you – us – and keep you safe.
“That’s why she impersonated my mother?”
Impersonated? Yes. An imposter. That poor woman. Dead.
A noise like static fills my brain as the door snickers open and an orderly appears with armed guards in tow. It’s the sound of my father sobbing, psionically, for the woman I guess was a real person once, before Spectra killed her to replace and stay close to my real mum and I like some deranged, mentally-defective cyborg.
The one chance she had at happiness for twenty-five years and it was a lie.
*
I MOMENTARILY FORGET about my father, a bit like how we manage to forget most days we could drop dead at any minute, anything from undiagnosed heart defects to the work of micro-cosmic particles punching their way through space able to tear us and our miserable souls away from the planet and all life.
Loren is standing with her back to me, but she turns about in her short, off-white hospital gown as I enter the room. I am shocked to see how normal she looks – or something close to it. She’s hollow-eyed and her hair is loose, scattered just like you’d expect from someone who has had more pressing issues than personal grooming. Normal really is the word, but it’s fair to say I’ve been spoilt. Normal is almost an insult compared to the godly being I’ve known as Loren, the Seeker.
One hand moves nervously to the inside of her opposite elbow and Loren takes half a step, nothing more, her eyes drawn to the floor as I gawp from the doorway. My gaze pores over her blotchy complexion, her halo of bed hair, the cracked lips and bleary eyes I once called caramel and are now simple hardware store brown. Seeker’s aura has departed for good, a blessing with one final get-out-of-jail-free card, it seems, and the glow of Loren’s perfection smokes like a candle extinguished in the wind.
“Baby. . . .”
“Joseph.”
She moves away rather than toward me. Not a good sign. Her skittish posture reminds me of a junkie, nails scrabbling at the habit as she breaks the briefest of eye contacts and goes around to the end of the bed and curls both hands on the white metal bed-post.
“I can’t believe you’re alive,” I say and walk into the room, awkwardness be damned. “Are you . . . OK? Fuck. I know that’s a totally retarded thing to ask, but you’ve gotta cut me some slack, baby. I’m still playing catch-up here.”
“He killed me, Joe.”
I pull up, spooked, and nod.
“Arsenal –”
“He killed me. As good as killed me. And where were you?”
I suck in a slow breath.
“Baby, I –”
“Stop calling me baby!” Loren all but screams.
Tears dribble from her eyes and her hands go as white as the enamel pipe as she clutches the infrastructure.
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, what’s that for Joe?”
“Anything. Everything,” I say.
Tentative steps, like cornering a wild animal or a naughty child. I lift my hand.
“Sorry for anything that might’ve hurt you.”
She sniffs. “Too late.”
I move in and think it’s all going to be good. She’s crumpling into my arms and my hand moves to smooth the back of her head, but my heart’s hammering with disquiet and she feels strange, foreign, a stranger. Even with Seeker’s powers gone, as Lioness, there was a vitality, an essence now missing from this woefully prosaic, depleted being – this girl, whose love I can feel draining away almost faster than my own.
“Loren?”
She looks up. Watery eyes betray her thoughts and mine as well. Her lip trembles in that great tradition of Hollywood actresses everywhere, the helplessness of her inner conflict matched only by the shit-fight her life’s become in the universe outside her skull. We never really ponder how it is we become ourselves and not somehow someone else in life’s great eschatological roulette, how we incarnate into the one historico-biological entity that we’re then shackled to like a warden with the asylum’s worst inmate on day release for seventy or eighty years, if we’re lucky. Here up close I see that private life more alive and aflame in those pallid brown eyes than ever I registered when we were together and empowered, yet the more real she has become – and less fantastical – the more pain for us both.
“Don’t say it, Joe,” she says, tiredly drawing away.
Any fear she might collapse on me is gone and instead Loren simply looks exhausted and very, very d
isappointed.
“Just don’t lie to me. Go.”
“Go?”
I say it with a howl, almost convincing myself I really am as irate as I sound.
“Please, Joe. Zephyr. Just go.”
“I love you,” I say and gulp.
“The hell you do, Joseph. Please. I asked you not to say that.”
“I didn’t know I was going to,” I tell her.
Loren shrugs. She won’t look at me. She walks from the end of the bed to the chair across the room like a cripple would, supporting herself on the furniture in-between. As she sits, the air comes out of her like from the sails of a plague ship and her lashes remain low and I realize she ain’t ever gonna to look up at me again, at least not with the eyes I want.
The door bangs closed behind me.
Zephyr 9.6 “My Nemesis Befriended”
THAT WAS A terrible scene back there, Joey-boy. What’s going on?
“You tell me, pops,” I snap as I march down the hospital-white halls.
Hang on, lad. You left that beautiful girl back there thinking you don’t love her. What’s going on?
“I told her I loved her.”
Well yeah, you told her that. It’s not true though, is it?
“Please. Leave me alone.”
I ask an orderly for directions to an exit and wind up on another roof-top, a nice view of the missile array as I startle a few doctors smoking between shifts, the low hum of the air-conditioning a veritable symphony compared to the sterile torpor inside the Foucauldian nightmare that is White Nine.
I move off by myself and eye the stark horizon, crenulated with the silhouettes of the other buildings making up the complex on Rykers. The complete non-presence of my father inside my skull weighs on me heavily.
“I did love her,” I say quietly, just another patient having a word with himself. “I can’t explain it. I’m the fucking Antichrist, OK?”
You know that’s not true.
“Well actually I don’t,” I reply softly. “It sounded pretty convincing coming from Twilight. Explained a whole heap, to be honest.”
What, that Nancy-boy?
“World’s changed since you, uh, went inside, pa.”
Zephyr III Page 8
