Zephyr I

by Warren Hately

  Anyway that’s what she said, drunk I think, during last night’s five-minute phone call. The night before, something about why I always had to run away, that she shouldn’t even speak to me again. That’s how we’ve been traveling so far, five minutes of venom in the evening, regular as clockwork, a drip feed to wean me off the life I once knew and she claims I took for granted.

  The night previously, she agrees to split custody of Tessa, saying she knows I would probably be glad to be off the hook, but then accuses me of being lost without the responsibility of caring for someone other than myself.

  The cheek. I don’t know what she thinks I’ve been doing all these years.

  I hunch down yet further in the seat opposite my gorgeous companion.

  “I don’t know what you want, Seeker,” I eventually mutter.

  She orders Earl Grey. I signal half-heartedly for more coffee. It’s more likely to make me sprout wings than keep awake, the state I’m in, and getting up six times in the night to piss is just about what I deserve considering all I’ve been putting myself through.

  Waves of self-pity roll off me and I think about Seeker’s sensitivity to such things and actually apologize for projecting such a fucked-up mental state.

  “Don’t worry,” she says quietly. “We are . . . together . . . in the everyday world. I’m not much more telepathic here than you are. It’s just, Elsewhere, my powers amplify. . . .”

  “Like last week,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry for that.”

  To my astonishment, Seeker, disguised as J-Lo or something, reaches across and takes my hand.

  “I’m not.”

  I stare down at her porcelain knuckles, dusted with the lightest summer tan, the bones in her hand a perfect form, a sculpture Da Vinci would have killed for, though I realize belatedly that however much she pulls back the glow, this resonance, part of her considerable beauty, is a consequence of that – her eternal connection to her Afterlife.

  “I’m not sure where you’re taking this, Seeker.”

  “Here you should call me Lo –”

  “You’re Seeker,” I hiss, not with malice but insistence, and a few heads rise at neighboring booths and I sink my face into another scalding cup and mutter something unhelpful about my shitty luck. I’ve got a talent for looking a gift horse in the mouth.

  When I lift my weary eyes, the hurt and vulnerability, the sheer virginity of her gaze is too much for me – me who has shed too many tears of my own during the past days. She removes the tinted glasses, bringing in the heavy artillery with every splinter of fragility apparent in that dangerous honey-eyed gaze.

  Freshly disintegrated marriage notwithstanding, I could take her home and shag her six different ways. I could spend a week with my face between her legs alone. And then perhaps I would be the piece of shit everything and everyone seems to be telling me I am. And so the only answer is to be an even bigger shit and walk away.

  I pull back my hand and something in her gaze resolves, hardens.

  “I’ll get to the point,” she says.

  “Good,” I reply. “Please do.”

  “I’m reforming the Sentinels,” she says. “I want you on the team.”

  It’s a brand new day. Wifeless, a new future calls. It’s still a big leap.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I think this latest fiasco shows we need some greater co-ordination.”

  I shake my head in wordless thought, the concept ticking over.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I’m deadly serious, Zephyr. I want you to consider my offer. I already have backers willing to support us. We won’t have to cosy up to the Government or the Mayor’s office.”

  “Fine,” I reply. “I’ll think about it. Next time you want to talk, call my cell.”

  Like a total pimp, I toss a business card on the table and walk.

  *

  I AM AWARE that three ski-masked gunmen have robbed the van that carries the Skyrail ticket take. What they are going to do with a ton-and-a-half of coins is anyone’s guess. I’m not interested. Let the police deal with it for once.

  I am at home on the sofa. I haven’t got any further than a single cardboard box of my possessions, stacked on the edge of the glass coffee table to suggest I’ve been fired from a job rather than a marriage. I wave the TV remote with sullen indolence. The police commissioner is on television barely managing not to swear as reporters do their job for a change and ask why Atlantic City’s founding fathers didn’t build in a better disaster defense system. To the plebs at street level it’s a valid question. And it raises again the inevitable specter of Seeker reforming the Sentinels.

  I can see they would be . . . useful. I’m just not sure I can bear to be part of all that madness again. But that’s not saying much since I’m not sure I can face nightfall at the moment.

  Commissioner Journey is replaced on the screen by an advertisement for photocopiers. The ad features British heroine Shade laying on one, and then appearing to pleasure herself. It doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but probably sells a lot of photocopiers.

  The local news is still doing follow-ups of people affected by the Panic. Randall Hugh Dowling, 34, perceived himself to be a bank clerk trapped on a sentient island of incorrectly filed tax receipts, with casual eternities of painful math interrupted only by the savage violence of sporadic bank robberies, the clown-faced villains pistol-raping the tellers, setting them on fire, forcing them to eat excrement, broken glass, used menstrual pads, bad Korean food. While doctors hope Mr Dowling might be clear for release sometime around 2015, he’ll never be able to open so much as a savings account without shitting himself, the TV guy explains.

  Also in the news: mysterious disappearances in the Australian outback; a nuclear bomb plot by Finnish separatists foiled; a pro-eugenics protester halted by the Coast Guard off the coast of Old Manhattan with a dingy packed full of explosives; author Orson Scott Card dies faking his own death; a Newfoundland trawler crew renounce fishing after claims of contact with “intelligent fish”; three top UN weapons scientists missing from the Ukraine; calls for mutant gene testing in the National Basketball League; unexplained lights over New Hampshire; Paragon and Jocelyn announce their official engagement; the villain Zero hands himself in to police and requests a fair trial; Queen Bee in yet another lesbian photo scandal; and the villain Grimoire sues Neil Gaiman for copyright.

  As I watch the flatscreen, I gently probe my front bottom teeth with two fingers. One part of my thrashing at Twilight’s hands Seeker wasn’t able to simply reverse with a wash of Otherworldly power. I’m an eight-year-old again, at least as far as my lower front incisors are concerned. The stubs are about halfway through now. Makes eating the steak sandwiches I keep ordering from Gunga Diner mighty hard to chew.

  The news washes over me as the phone rings. First it’s Doc Prendergast, hoping against hope I was too drunk to remember any new sightings of Hermes when he spoke to me last. The news segues into something vaguely interesting about the history of a missing 1960s government eugenics research team when the Enercom phone rings again and it’s Nautilus, calling from LA following a mild quake, just wanting to “you know, catch up,” and quickly moving on to asking if I have the number of “that guy, you know, we busted him that time on his first outing as a bad guy, wore a hockey mask and called himself Night Stalker or something – didn’t his father work for Warner Brothers”? I hate disappointing old friends so I pretend it’s a bad line, and after several minutes’ hesitation staring at the phone like a broken facial recognition program, I dunk the stupid thing in a flat, half-empty schooner of lite beer with cigarette butts bobbing in it.

  The home phone rings almost straight away and I guiltily look around at the disheveled apartment and slump lower in the chair. I’m wearing a dirty Hawkwind tee-shirt and nothing else. Hell, I live alone now and I wipe my ass properly, so why not? I snatch up the phone and it’s only because there’s not enough roo
m left in the glass that I relent and answer.

  “Daddy?”

  The trembling lip and incipient tears sends an electric tingle down my spine that tightens my asshole as I imagine those dreaded next few words, words telling me that finally an old enemy has caught up with my wife and daughter and is about to extract his revenge.

  But it’s not. Not this time at least. Tessa’s hesitation is everything I’ve otherwise come to associate with my own fucked-up, irrational and completely ordinary home life. There’s no plot-driven revenge here, folks, just a fearful, tearful little girl, the same one who used to pretend the fairies were the ones leaving those “I love you dad and mum” notes whenever she could hear Beth and I arguing late at night.

  “Tessa. Baby. Are you OK?”

  When the howling stops, she explains her mother destroyed her cell and has banned her from calling “that monster you call your father”.

  “It’s like she’s making herself hate you so she can’t turn back,” my nearly fifteen-year-old wise woman tells me.

  “I’m not sure it’s an act, baby,” I explain. “It’s been hard for your mother, all these years. You know. The secret.”

  “But the secret is wonderful, daddy.”

  Tessa’s reply catapults her right back securely into childhood. And her naivety is enough to make me well up. I shake my head to clear the sentiment and only half succeed, sounding like a blubbery mess to her on the other end of the phone.

  “I’ll be gone from here soon, honey, then you can have your room back. Maybe it’ll help make things feel a little more normal.”

  “That’s what mum says,” Tessa replies. “She says it wasn’t like you were ever there anyway.”

  I hang my head a moment and when I lift it up, the curious image of snowstorms sweeping across the Hell Gate Bridge catches my attention seconds before the overhyped voice-over starts making sense. Tessa keeps talking, but to my shame it is the flatscreen newscast that wins out.

  “Breaking news now from the Queens area, our local affiliate is on the ground and in the air. Do not adjust your sets, viewers. While winter storms are still more than three months away, Weather Department satellites are confirming what you are seeing now courtesy of a live NBN feed. An unusual spike in weather activity. . . .”

  “Dad?” Tessa senses my absence again, a sixth sense due her particular upbringing. “What is it?”

  “Trouble I think, honey. I’ve gotta go.”

  Zephyr 3.7 “The Impromptu Freakshow”

  STUPIDLY, I DON’T even wait for her reply. I hang up, still watching open-mouthed as the news cameras hone in on the image of a man blurred to obscurity by the hissing white fog around him, walking down the middle of the bridge. The helicopter can’t catch the phenomenon of stalled car windshields shattering as the ghostly character advances. On the ground, a reporter with a borrowed anorak and a ten dollar haircut adjusts himself like the fine upstanding peacock of the species he is before leaping in front of the end of the bridge, oblivious to the waves of unseasonably dressed motorists exiting vehicles around him in a great dystopian rush.

  The reporter, quickly rendered anonymous for the white phosphorescence, yells in a well-mannered way, one finger in his ear.

  “Eyewitnesses say the man walked out of a downtown tenement just under an hour ago, and temperatures started dropping from that point on. No one’s yet been able to identify the man or where he comes from. Rumors that he stepped ashore from an ice floe in Miskatonic Harbor are untrue, the Port Authority says.”

  I watch the reporter and his invisible flunkies. With nervous enthusiasm, they hurry on to the bridge. The epicenter of the phenomenon is still too distant for the telecast, much to the frustration of its producers. The view switches to the chopper again, an interchangeable female for the scarf-wearing male on the ground, the blonde hair and stylish reading glasses little more than a prop for a piece of lucrative televised theatre.

  “Experts estimate the air temperature is below freezing point down on the Hell Gate Bridge.”

  The woman shouts into the camera, positioned precariously to catch the money shot out the open door. I can’t claim to know the girl, but the harness does wonders for her cleavage.

  “Contrast this to a forecast for earlier today and twenty-two degrees Celsius.”

  The camera zooms through the freezing air to disclose the vaguest images of a man – at least something humanoid in shape. It is either the intrusion of the lens or a precipitous moment, for the figure gestures roughly and a sheet of whiteness obscures the view, but not the sound. The chopper’s engine noise becomes decidedly intermittent and the cutesy reporter starts shrieking like a wounded baboon.

  In a studio somewhere, the best contribution a male anchor can make is to repeat the words “Oh dear” over and over again.

  On the bridge, they know what side their bread is buttered on. The male reporter no more than harshly waves and the cameraman shifts to focus through the tense struts of the bridge to catch a view of the ice-bound helicopter falling lazily, heavy all of a sudden as its implausible physics catches up to it, forcing it down and into the river. The few remaining spectators shriek. The wavering camera accidentally catches a shot of the earnest young journo blanching at what he’s just witnessed. First draft of history my ass. He clears his throat, nods that he’s OK to keep going, and just as he readjusts the concealed knot of his tie, a sheet of snow floods the camera, whiting out the scene like God’s own hasty edit.

  The erasure is total. It would be embarrassing if it wasn’t so morbid as the home broadcasters try and rustle up a signal, a live body to say something. Instead, the silence rules supreme. The image flicks to a studio, the camera focusing in a rush on the man with the useless epithets. They’re good, though, these TV news people. Used to thinking on their feet. Suspended in the top right corner of the screen is a little boxed image of their own news chopper dropping like a stone, the NBN brand hazed by static on the vehicle’s side, the words “Arctic mystery” emblazoned beneath.

  I am perplexed by the persistent buzzing noise in my apartment until the beer glass at my left explodes and my sponsor-endorsed phone starts vibrating around the wet table like a fresh fish with a call-sign all its own. I shake the dripping thing off before reluctantly pressing down on the receiver.

  “Zephyr,” the voice says.

  It’s Twilight.

  “This is the big one,” he says.

  “It’s Hammer time?”

  “Hariss as-Sama, yes.”

  “You don’t have to correct me,” comes my arch reply. “I knew who you meant. I was making a pun.”

  “. . . OK.”

  “I take it you’re in?”

  “Yes. Zephyr,” Twilight says, his voice unused to hesitation. “This is . . . a chance for me.”

  “It is,” I reply. “Your last chance, you fucking cross-dresser. Screw this up and next time when I kick your ass, you’re history.”

  I snap the phone shut, victorious in every sense except that I have an ear wet with stale, nicotine-flavored beer.

  *

  THERE ARE SOME things a guy has to do sometimes, even a super-guy like me, despite the, uh, clarion call to battle, or whatever it is.

  The moment the phone is down I hit the fridge, grabbing another one of those god-awful lite beers Beth must’ve started buying, along with a plastic satchel of slightly suspect-looking pastrami and packet cheese. I crack the beer and take a grimacing slug before making a rough sandwich from the remaining bread crusts. Then I head to the lavatory, take a quick leak, and hit the secret button for my den.

  It’s depressing to think I’ll soon be living out of a motel or something while my wife will continue on in the apartment with a superhero’s homemade secret laboratory in the wallspace. Maybe I should do something about it. God knows how I’m going to react if she ends up with another guy. It’s a sobering thought, and not the least of it the ongoing risk to my secret identity.

  My leather costume has
fallen from the peg during my week off and come to rest in a spot of damp I normally conceal with the wastepaper basket. I retrieve the leather leggings and they don’t smell good. I haven’t even done anything about the shredded sleeves and cum stains, courtesy of Seeker’s dose of holy goodness. I would consider it the first orgasm I’ve had courtesy of that particular superbabe except perhaps my right hand and I wouldn’t be being honest.

  The costume, then, is a no go. I sigh, moving aside some clutter to expose the museum piece red-and-white suit, the long narrow cape in red with the logo, refined somewhat since those days, cast in white down the middle. It’s not like I am capable of putting on much weight, so the dang thing should still fit no matter how far I’ve let myself go – and a quick glance into the Ikea shaving mirror reminds me of the stubble I really don’t have time to remove. So the facts being what they are, with a mouthful of pastrami and cheddar that won’t quite go down, I strip off my tee-shirt and start sliding on the double-lycra thickened by waterproofing and flame-retardant chemicals.

  The little mirror doesn’t have much range, so I can only imagine what my ass looks like in this and marvel at the fact I used to stretch into this get-up for hours every day and even sometimes grabbed late-night supplies from the store when Tessa was little and kept Beth up late with her teething. There’s nothing for it now.

  The cloak gets caught as I maneuver uncomfortably in the confined space, nearly upending the computer on its card table. I finish the beer for good luck, and I tell myself sincerely, also the energy, and then hit the catch on the secret exit and launch into the night.

  It is going dark. The lights of the city make a pretty spectacle with the falling temperature. For miles upon miles, the whole region succumbs to the advancing cold, snowflakes refracting the artificial light. I belt across the city at a fair clip, Queens my old stomping grounds, a faint trill of worry when I think of my parents, though at least I know there’s not much chance my wife and child would be in danger there as Queens is the last place Beth would run.