Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  I give a snap look around at onlookers banked up on the far side of the street, phone cameras flashing, and a second later I jet high into the air and turn, an awesome beast of anger and self-loathing headed for a reunion with a room full of the last people I really want to see.

  Zephyr 12.6 “What Happens Next”

  CONTRADICTORY MOTHERFUCKER THAT I am, amid my woe and anguish about Loren two things occur to me at once: Zephyr’s credibility is going to be up shit creek if I turn up to Paragon and Jocelyn’s wedding dateless, and I also have a deep cellular craving to see Holland aka Cusp again.

  It has been . . . a long time. I am self-consciously gritting my teeth about it, thoughts wending their way back through the past year and my prolonged stint of powerlessness and the awful exegesis of Loren’s torture and near murder at the hands of a man who I haven’t honestly even tried to trace, not that (and mostly because) I don’t know how. I’m no Nancy Drew, never was. Last time I saw Holland I had a grin on my face and a boner in my pants and I hadn’t even dreamt up masquerading as The Devil’s Advocate, let alone disappearing off-world, nearly getting killed, possessed by my father and dumped in a Neo-Tokyo dystopia with my mum’s former girlfriend.

  I told Holland I’d be back. I have just enough cocksure fidelity to my own worst intentions that however much it might feel like eating shit through a straw, I’d rather do that than deny my own urges. So with that thought in mind I’m halfway across the city traveling at just under five-hundred mph when I veer off like a storm warning and hover beneath Mach as I jet across this big fucked up megalopolis.

  There is a handy back alley and dumpster just off Fifty-First. After hiding like a pervert beside a delivery van, I step out when Holland exits the GBLT-friendly bookstore where she told me she’s basically an indentured servant. She looks awesome, dressed for the change in seasons in a chartreuse Vivica Allen secretary skirt, thick stockings, leather knee-highs by Marco Polo and what I am guessing is a flowy Ralph Lauren top in autumn peach. She looks beautiful, carefree in a downbeat sort of way as she passes the alley and glances in out of caution. I am struck that she must be a frustrating workmate for the dykes in the bookstore unless Holland also goes that way, though she might have tried out just to find out, given last time we spoke her memories were still fried.

  I wave and Holland pauses, bug-eyed. Then she emits a huff, hair actually blowing clear of her face, and then she keeps walking. I jog out on her tail, grinning goofily to myself at her clear annoyance.

  “OK, what do you wanna do? Have me trail you like this? Come on, Holland. Stop.”

  A few pedestrians gasp to see me. Holland halts as a Chinese couple panic trying to get their cameras out and I stand there embossed by their digital flashes as I try to look both inscrutable and sympathetic to Holland’s concerns.

  “What do you want with me?” she asks.

  “I want to ask you out.”

  “Don’t you have a prior commitment?”

  She mimes looking at a watch though she actually does wear one, which almost catches her by surprise.

  “You know, the ‘wedding of the century’?”

  “That’s where I wanted to take you. Or, not you, exactly, but. . . .”

  “Cusp?”

  She grunts and gives the hairy eyeball to the tourists. They fuck off.

  “You’ve got a lot of balls, mister.”

  “Just two. Big hairy ones.”

  My grin slips as I realize what a stupid line that is. Holland makes a face, would make a worse one if she had to picture the image my own words conjure of me straddling her face – like we’ve done, and she won’t remember. A pang of guilt? Maybe not quite.

  “I don’t just give it away to anyone, Joseph. Where did you go?”

  “It’s Zephyr. Please, honey. Come on.”

  I make like to take her arm.

  “Let’s go somewhere.”

  Holland’s sense of self-preservation wins out as she eyes back in the direction of her bookstore closing up for the night. From here I can see the silhouette of Old Manhattan, this area once the Williamsburg precinct of Brooklyn now sealed off from the river behind huge concrete walls. A nearby Starbucks teems with life and it’s she who takes my arm and hustles me back into the alley, then pushing me ahead of her like a naughty child about to receive the belt.

  *

  “YOU MAY AS well’ve just abandoned me, Zephyr,” Holland says in her sweetly irate voice, tucking back long locks of lustrous Valkyrie hair behind one ear as she reassures herself as to the security of our little impromptu rendezvous.

  “Look, you gotta understand,” I reply, straining the whine from my tone. “A lot of crazy shit has been going on.”

  “I read about the girl. The one who died. I’m sorry. You got your powers back and I was so happy for you. I thought we’d catch up soon and celebrate. But you never came.”

  I rock on my heels for a moment, uncertain how to reply. Holland adds: “They say you killed Seeker and made the other one a homeless lady?”

  “That’s not true,” I reply.

  “Then what did happen?”

  “This is what you want to talk about?”

  Holland frowns a moment. Into that gap I inject, “We can talk about anything you like over dinner. Be my plus-one, OK? Please. I don’t have anyone else.”

  “I take it that was meant to sound earnest rather than desperate?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Jesus, Zephyr. How can you ask me like this? I don’t have anything to wear and I just got off a shitty week --”

  “You’ve got your costume, don’t you?”

  “Jesus, Zephyr. Grammar. You want me to come as Cusp? She’s a nobody.”

  “So? Half of the freaks and geeks in North America will be there.”

  “Including Twilight?”

  “Yeah,” I reply more slowly. “I guess you two have unfinished business.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Still no memories?” I ask.

  “I’m still working here, aren’t I?”

  “Look, maybe we can do something about that. You must have friends and family, Loren, and we can –”

  “Whoa,” Holland says and puts up her hand to stay me. “What did you just call me?”

  I desperately try to replay the tape on whatever crap’s been coming out of my mouth and come up a blank, like I slipped onto autopilot for a minute or more.

  “Uh, what?”

  “You called me ‘Lauren’?”

  Loren, I think self-consciously and cringe, shaking my head. “No. No.”

  “That’s her name, isn’t it? Seeker? The other one. The one who didn’t die.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Jesus Christ, Zephyr. Go sort your life out and I don’t even know if I want you to give me a call when you finish. Take care.”

  And that’s how one of the hottest women I’ve ever known walks out of my life.

  Probably just as well given what happens next.

  Zephyr 12.7 “Unconscious Gaze”

  I HAVE BARELY started on my goddamn way to this stupid frigging wedding when my Enercom phone starts up. With a finger in my ear to cut out interference in the turbulence, I snatch the phone out and go to answer without really checking who is on the other end until my unconscious gaze happens to take in my estranged wife’s name etched in glowing blue on the face-plate.

  My chest constricts. Dr Di Profundis’s molecular instability ray barely slowed me down, but the mere chirruping of the phone knowing Elisabeth is on the other end sends my atoms screaming down my bowels and almost out the other end. Still yet to answer, I veer away like a veritable fucking Superman and alight athwart the mock crenulations of the Downton Abbey and hit reply.

  “Beth?”

  “Joe? Oh God. Thank God you answered.”

  “Holy shit,” I reply, astonished on so many levels by the strength of emotion pouring through the phone that I couldn’t possibly detail them all here. “Is everyt
hing OK?”

  “No. No it’s not.”

  “Are you OK?” I bark.

  “I’m . . . I –”

  “Is it Tessa?”

  “No, I . . . Joe, I need Zephyr to come to my work. Now.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “Your work?”

  “Fucking hell, Joe. What is this?”

  “Sorry. I’m . . . disoriented.”

  I splutter like a fish out of water for a few secs.

  “Are you sure you’re OK?”

  “Just come. Please. Hurry.”

  “What are you doing still at work? It must be after seven by now.”

  But the phone goes dead.

  My heart feels not so much pulled in multiple directions as torn out of my chest and then used to kick a field goal. I stash the phone with shaking digits and have to really think to orient myself to the high rise where my lawyer ex works. My daughter’s chattering shadow voice sounds in my ear, reminding me Elisabeth has reputedly taken up with her Norwegian-American boss Harald and that leads me back along a Hanselundgretelian line of reasoning to my daughter’s fear of being forcibly relocated to England, as per some shadowy, probably not exactly sinister plan of her mother’s.

  And I still haven’t organized a lawyer of my own yet. I can’t even remember at that moment if I’ve signed divorce papers.

  “Holy shit, Joe, get your act together.”

  I can see the Silver Tower in the distance. A giddy, stupid, inept, apoplectic and absolutely ridonkulous thought about taking Elisabeth as my date to the wedding of the century flits through my thoughts like a burning stripper doing cartwheels. And then I make like Tom Cruise as Neo and jet.

  *

  ANGLING IN ON my wife’s workplace, I see the only light on in the upper stories roughly accords with what I hazily recall on my few ever visits to this place I used to teasingly call the Grey Havens (there’s a Tolkien reference for ya). I never appreciated to what degree it really was a haven for Elisabeth, who poured more of her life-force and effort into her career and building a solid base for her future than I ever really understood before recent events. It should’ve been a warning. Shacking up with a senior partner isn’t really like her and I have to contend with the very real possibility this is love talking on her behalf, rather than sheer material advantage, however much Tessa might view it that way. I’m not thrilled by the prospect of some toffee-voiced Norsk Arisk lothario co-raising my daughter, especially if its halfway around the other side of the world, even if I can get there in under a couple of hours.

  But first things first.

  I might not have spider sense, but even a little fly-by from me has my hackles on the rise. I go past the lit-up windows as quick as a bat and catch a lick of figures, some in working clothes and some clearly not. Four, five max, but maybe as few as three.

  Enough for it to be Elisabeth and her Norwegian beau and whoever might be the cause of their distress.

  Beth asked for Zephyr, not Joseph to come, and that’s telling, especially if you consider Elisabeth would probably eat a mound of her own shit with proper cutlery before asking for any sort of appearance from that guy. Towards the end of our marriage she mostly spoke of Zephyr in the third person when talking to me and the comparisons weren’t pretty. Perhaps now (I reason like the pathetic wretch of a jealous ex-husband I am) I can change that opinion in some marvelously improbably turnaround common to any Adam Sandler comedy you might care to mention.

  It is three floors to the roof. I’m up there in an eye-blink and moving across the crunching tarmac, hibernating pigeons scuttling from the alligator tread on my boots as I wrench open the roof-top elevator shaft and drop down, hovering to count the way, though it is the sliver of light from between the dormant sliding doors that guides my way. As gently as possible I prise them apart, feeling more than hearing them snicker closed behind me like some sinister co-conspirator as I tread out into the decidedly mundane trappings of the mid-level law firm corridor of Elisabeth’s work.

  The voices carry from the conference room. What is it with me and them?

  “ – did you tell him? You better not have any secret code, you fucking bitch.”

  The voice is cold, but feminine, and oddly familiar. I’m left with the tip-of-your-tongue sensation common to inaccessible memories, ransacking the archive of my thoughts to try and place the crisp accent as I hear Elisabeth’s stammering reply.

  “He’ll come. He will.”

  “He’d better, or your boyfriend here will never get it up again.”

  “Please, don’t hurt him,” I hear Elisabeth sob, my smile faltering as I realize it is a plea on Harald’s behalf rather than any fear about what impending ambush awaits me.

  “Stop your whimpering. I can’t see what Zephyr ever saw in you.”

  “The feeling’s mutual,” Elisabeth tosses back.

  I blink. Then comes the reply, “I told you before. I’m gonna be the father of his children.”

  Derision overcoming caution, I step into the room and eyeball the pathetic tableau: Elisabeth at the side of a chair, face etched with concern for a handsome older leonine gent in a suit seemingly stuck to the chair by a fine layer of ice particles, and there across from them with a leathern fist on her skinny hip is blue-lipped Frost, her white hair longer and more grown out than last time I saw her, cascading over the inadequately filled leather bodice she wears reminiscent of an underage girl dressing up to impress her big sister’s friends.

  “Frost,” I say with a growl on my lips.

  But it is Elisabeth who turns to me, exhaustion dampening her previous tone of distress.

  “For God’s sake, Joe. You fucked this bitch?”

  “I – well, it was against my will,” I reply.

  “Well do it again,” Beth snaps. “Finish the job you started or we’re dead.”

  Zephyr 12.8 “Coitus Interruptus”

  IT’S ONLY ME who can have these sorts of dilemmas. So much for reversing the polarity of the ion stream or coming up with the missing consignment of Unobtainium. My mission, if I choose to accept it, is impregnating one of the most screw-loose villainesses in the known universe and letting her raise our illicit progeny to kick-start some kind of blue-toned master race.

  It’s no wonder super-types are hung up on eugenics, but really?

  I stammer, blinking like a cave dweller who’s just seen the light.

  I glance from haughty-looking Frost to Harald, the lawyer looking pretty blue-lipped himself, then I shift to Elisabeth shooting me one of her rare weird haunted/angry/traumatized/repulsed/hurt/vengeful/defiant looks she does oh so well. Slowly the coins trickle down in the steampunk contraption my addled brain has become and I realize her one sole desire in summoning me here is to save her own skin and the life of her new love.

  And to do that, I have to bone my nemesis in front of her.

  “Jesus Christ,” I say and stagger away, ruining the Shakespearean qualities of the scene as I move across to what I hope is a liquor cabinet only to tear the antique walnut door off a discreet stationery cupboard.

  “Fuck.”

  Frost and her oozing cooze slinks across the richly carpeted chamber and tries to take me by the arm and shoulder from behind, conciliatory even as I shrug the crazy bitch off.

  “Get away from me.”

  “Come now, my darling . . . My destiny.”

  “Lady, you are crazy bat-shit insane. Get the fuck away from me.”

  Elisabeth, sobbing, shrieks, “Just fuck her and get done with it!”

  “Why should I?” I bark back.

  Frost looks only mildly hurt. She has an uncanny resilience when it comes to my apparent indifference. I’m distracted by her bodice deliberately slipping down to reveal what you could barely call cleavage, one small perfectly shaped pearl-colored breast with a tiny hard bluish nipple. She catches me looking and winks, pink tongue playing along the rim of her blue lips, white teeth flashing in her narrow, well-shaped and ut
terly maniacal face. I curse.

  “You have to,” Beth replies.

  “You heard the lady,” Frost says. “And she’s gonna watch.”

  “Are you kidding me? They’re free to go. I can kick your ass any time I like, Frost. You keep this up and I’m gonna throw you out the window. It’s a long way down and I don’t recall you being able to fly.”

  “You’re not gonna murder me, Zephyr. I’m the future mother of your master race.”

  “You are mistaken. On both counts.”

  But Frost only smiles. Thought bubbles percolate and burst inside my brain. I track her knowing look back to Elisabeth, staring at me with weirdly convicted horror as she nurses her boss-cum-lover, snowflakes creeping into his perfectly manicured ash blonde hair and neatly clipped beard.

  “How do you think she found us, Joe?” Beth says. “She knows who we are. Who you are. All of us. There’s nothing to stop her coming again and again.”

  “That sounds good,” Frost purrs, trusting her to make a dirty pun of the situation if I’m not free to do so.

  “Jesus,” I say and my shoulders shake. I look back to Beth and fuck me if genuine tears don’t well in my eyes as I stammer, “I loved you. I still do, Beth. I never meant to hurt you.”

  “Give me a break, Joe,” she replies tiredly. “Maybe this crazy bitch forced herself on you. I get it. Whatever. I’m sure you hated every second of it –”

  “Minutes, baby. Minutes,” Frost eggs us on.

  “– but she wasn’t the first and probably wasn’t the last, was she, huh?” Beth says.

  And Beth knows she’s got me there. For one incandescent moment I try to get a grip on why I really was such a piece of shit as a husband to her when it came to fidelity, even though I tell myself I only ever cheated with my body and not my heart. But my reasoning quickly freefalls into an endless list I realize are excuses and justifications, not explanations.