Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “I thought we’d go to your place,” Annie nervously moans.

  I could interpret her sudden reluctance as the coltish tittering of a young woman overwhelmed by the strength of her own desires, so I turn her around, sliding my hand up inside her gown to cup her breast.

  “I don’t have a place,” I say like it barely matters. “You’re bigger than I remember.”

  Annie turns, arching back. I kiss her, missing her mouth.

  “I had them done,” she replies.

  “‘Done’?” I say, confused, smoothing back ash-blonde hair from her nape, drinking in her smell, eyes half-closed as I’m seduced as much by memories of the girl I once knew than the woman before me.

  “Yeah. I had a boob job,” she says, a slight huff in her voice. “You remember? I always wanted more up there.”

  “They don’t feel fake. I should know.”

  Annie turns completely. I kiss her. She returns my kiss almost like it’s an afterthought.

  “I went to BodyShop.”

  “BodyShop? What’s that?”

  “You don’t know? Remember the Twisted Sisters?”

  “The . . . flesh-mages, or whatever they were?”

  “They went retail. Well, high profile retail. Exclusive.”

  “Nice to see you’re making your salary count,” I snicker and return to business.

  We fuck for a while. It’s probably not everything it could be, but hey, she’s hung over and we’re doing it under a bridge, so it’s not optimal conditions. I go down on her for a while, lifting her on my shoulders and pressing her against the oil-stained, graffiti-rich concrete by force of my face alone, hoping I might improve how she ranks me later, but soon enough we’re done and Annie’s smoothing down her gown and declining my help to hobble back in her designer clogs into the smoky light of day to hail a passing taxi.

  “Sorry,” I say, shrugging.

  “I don’t know,” Annie says, a realist like most of us with crazy powers, no hard feelings in her voice despite my dying tadpoles drying down her inner thigh. “It’s not how I imagined it when I was younger. I used to think about doing it with you so much, Zeph. I guess I finally worked up the nerve.”

  “You should’ve said something earlier.”

  “Why didn’t you ever make a move?” I say. “Jesus. Miss Black. A guy’d jump at the chance.”

  “You didn’t. I mean, I know we used to say, ‘Zephyr, you know, he’s no telepath’.”

  “I always just thought that was a statement of the obvious. Of course I’m not a telepath.”

  “We were speaking figuratively. All of us. Most the time.”

  “You’re just a kid. It’s probably a mistake. You OK to get home?”

  “A kid? Zeph, I’m thirty.”

  I screw my eyes up hard enough to make my vision blur.

  “What? No.”

  “Yeah. I’d change the moniker to Ms Black, but it hasn’t got the same ring.”

  The taxi driver leans through the window at us, looking seriously pissed. I shrug and Annie gives me a kiss on the cheek and in moments, the dirty yellow cab is gushing exhaust as it barrels away through the underpass and makes a quick left to get the fuck out of this part of town.

  Zephyr 13.2 “Vanishing Act”

  I GUESS I still have my head in my ass or something because when I look up at the entrance to the diner and glimpse my daughter standing there all insouciant and shit, suddenly whack! A fist of compressed air particles knocks me back into a wizard’s nest of trash cans and badly tied garbage bags.

  “Hey Tess – er, Windsong. What gives?”

  There’s few things more imposing than the look of righteous annoyance on my daughter’s face, masked or not, and I find my eyes slinking sideways as I pick myself up and re-approach. We are in the asshole of the universe as far as the city is concerned, even the pimps and drug runners with something better to do than hang out on this god-forsaken strip.

  Tessa harrumphs and starts walking rapidly away up the sidewalk. Shades of Holland aka Cusp. Belatedly I give chase feeling like a frazzled waiter trying to appease a dissatisfied customer before she rats me out to the boss.

  “Hey! Hey honey, where are you going? Stop.”

  Tessa does. She whirls and swings a clumsy haymaker at me. I duck, reflexively pushing away her arm and then stepping in with the catch before her critical over-balancing lands her on the seat of her pants. Just as I expected, she totally resents my effort to help her and she shakes me off, growling, and struts off up the street away.

  “OK this is really boring. You know I’m no telepath, Windsong.”

  She stops, turns. “Called a lawyer yet?”

  “Honey –”

  “Or are you too busy boffing some C-grade talent to –”

  “Hey don’t say that about –” I catch myself and Tessa gives a veiled triumphant grin.

  I scowl, mindful I could tell her about the fact screwing Frost possibly saved her mother’s life less than 24 hours past. But that’s probably not going to redound to anyone’s honor, as they say in the classics. I demur, hang my head, reversing the tables on my truculent teenager. Transactional analysis eat my ass.

  We stand there like homeless people, actors in some political theatre troupe’s abstract tableau as a city bus grumbles past with a huge sign for a new band called the Cow-goths. Or I assume they’re a band, all black hats, spurs and eyeliner, one dressed in seemingly nothing but coiled ropes. The bus deposits a few passengers like steaming piles and moves on again.

  I close on my daughter so we are near enough to keep it civil. Taking her arm gently, the smell of her hair is refreshing as trash tumbleweeds down the street and a row of salvage stores and army surpluses open for the day across the road amid the roar of uncaged metal shutters.

  “Me speaking to a lawyer is like . . . Like taking on the Death Star solo, you know? Your mom and her guy, they’re both lawyers. I can’t beat them at their own game. That stuff you hear about fighting fire with fire is just bad song lyrics, ‘kay?”

  “So you’re just gonna give up? We talked about this. You were gonna fight for me.”

  “I am fighting for you. For me too. I’m trying to work an angle. I’m wasting my time going that route with the lawyers though. Tessa, honey, I don’t have any money.”

  “So get a job.”

  This rebuke causes me to snap my mouth shut. I do the head-tilt thing I’ve described so cutely so many times before. “You what?”

  “Why not, dad? Everyone else does it.”

  “Hey, you can’t even stay in school, so don’t start telling me what I should do,” I say. “Hell, what are you even doing out at this time anyway? You’re sixteen . . . Windsong.”

  “I blame my father.”

  “Cute.” I shake my head. “I couldn’t get a job in a 7-11 and you know it.”

  “Maybe, but that’s something I’d like to see.”

  The barest thawing of tensions. Tessa gives a grin. I grimace, relieved.

  “You should be getting home. I’ve got this, OK? I haven’t forgotten about you.”

  At this inopportune moment a black BMW pulls into the curb and for the first time I notice Tessa’s clutching a cell in one hand. The car window inches down and I get a glimpse of Harald and then the passenger door cracks open and out comes Beth.

  “Oh boy,” I say, preparing for the worst.

  *

  BETH LOOKS LIKE a high-price lawyer or call girl. Maybe both. She also closely resembles a woman who has been up most the night wondering where her daughter is following a near-death experience of her own at the hands of a masked madwoman. I also discern a hint of just-watched-husband-have-sex-with-supervillainess in her wounded glare.

  “Hi,” I say and give a little wave.

  Beth stares hard at Tessa and Windsong grunts and sashays around the other side of the car and gets in back. Beth turns that hard-boiled look on me.

  “What have you got to say for yourself, asshole?”

>   “Me?” I swallow a golf ball of spit that’d do Peter North proud. “Beth. Honey.”

  I look at the car, glad at least to see Harald’s focused on my daughter the hellcat in his back seat rather than me. I refocus with difficulty.

  “What?”

  Croaking. That’s me in the corner. Losing my dignity.

  “Your stupid secret identity’s gone, Joe. You nearly got Harald killed.”

  “Give me a break, Beth. I’ve been kicking ass and taking names all night. Didn’t you hear Paragon’s bride-to-be was killed tonight?”

  “Then why do you smell like sex?”

  I blink, getting offended until I realize she’s picked up on Annie Black’s musk. How quickly we forget. I blink a few more times, trying to reposition my argument despite the elephant in the room having its trunk up my ass.

  “It’s been a hard 24 hours, OK? I can’t – I literally can’t – remember the last time I slept.”

  “You always used to bitch about Jocelyn. I thought you’d be glad to see her go.”

  “And what kind of person would that make me?” I retort.

  Beth’s expression says it all. She glowers, arms folded as I step closer, mindful of the smell of Miss Black’s punani upholstering my crotch.

  “Are you OK?” I ask her.

  Beth’s wounded gaze falters, quickly scanning me for sarcasm, opportunism, sadism, or a heady mix of all three.

  “What do you care?”

  My eyes flick to Harald in the car.

  “Isn’t there any hope for us, Beth? I really –”

  “What?” she snaps.

  Too late I realize yes, I’ve really blown it.

  “You still stink of some trashy bitch and you dare ask me that? Who was she?”

  In a moment of honesty, I tell her. Past the point of no return. Instead of fury, Beth’s response is almost lazy, introspective. Curious. A collector of my indiscretions like other people curate rare baseball cards.

  “Annie Black? I assumed you’d fucked her years ago.”

  “Never,” I say, response a plea for absolution, a hope for redemption. It’s stupid, I know. “I was always true to you, Beth. I always was.”

  “Horse shit,” she replies. “You cheated on me too many times to count, and that’s just the ones I knew about, or guessed.”

  “I never cheated on you in my heart.”

  “Joe, that is bullshit, even for you.”

  “It’s true,” I say, and for that one clouds-clearing-into-brilliance moment, I believe it. “You have no idea what it was like. Honestly. I know this sounds like a crock of shit. The more I listen to myself talk, hell, fuck, even I know what a piece of shit I am Beth, but you have to put yourself in my shoes. Into the mask. I was young. Transformed, you know? That lightning bolt triggered something waiting in my DNA. I know I’m Lennon’s . . . well actually I’m not Lennon’s child, I know now. Fuck, I really gotta find out more about that. That’s what the blue-skinned freak from the future said.”

  “Your son,” Beth calmly replies, heavy-lidded, inured to my particular breed of madness.

  “Those other women never meant anything. I can’t think of one who does now.”

  “I always admired your grammar, Joe. That’s about all you’ve got left.”

  “I was weak. I still am. That’s what the postmodern types’d call irony, right Beth? The power of half-a-million frigging lightbulbs, or whatever the old commercial said . . . but I couldn’t resist the lure. I did it all, I know, but I never stopped loving you. And this is my karma too. I know that as well.”

  I don’t know why I am transcribing all this, oh you mute witness of my utmost humiliation. Breathless, I know. Read on.

  “It’s worse than that, Joe,” Beth says. “Until last year, I’d never been with another man.”

  “There was that time with that girl from Records, you said –”

  “We agreed never to talk about that,” Beth snaps. “My point is I was true to you. I kept the faith. You’re the one who blew it. Over and over again. I didn’t just give you a second chance, Joe. I gave you dozens. Hundreds. And you hurt me again and again and disappointed me more times than I ever hurt you.”

  I am crucified by my own shame. Head down. I barely hear the car door open.

  “Easy for you to say, ma,” Tessa says.

  I look. There’s fury in my daughter’s voice, something alight in her face, her hair, the astral breeze lifting her thick locks as she rounds on her mother with a lifetime’s pent-up aggression. It’s truly an awful moment to watch the hunter become the hunted as Beth freezes in Tessa’s high beams.

  “Easy for you to stand there and pick him apart. We all know dad’s a fuck-up, mom,” Tessa growls. “But at least he’s a victim to his passions. He has a heart. Unlike you. You stopped caring a thousand years ago. Maybe it was to protect yourself. But what about me, huh?”

  I feel like puking. I want to side with Beth just out of sympathy, but I suspect this is a moment these two have had coming for a long time.

  Yet Beth say nothing. Thick tears trickle down her face. Harald stiffly rises from the Beemer and she angrily waves him back. For all his power and education and money, I can see who wears the pants in that relationship already and damn me if I don’t pity the guy. I give him a little emoticon sigh of sympathy he doesn’t understand.

  Beth turns to Tessa and her head tilts. And just as she’s about to say something, Tessa grinds salt into the wound, showing her youth and immaturity by waving her hand to enforce her mother’s silence, a gust of wind making us both take a step back.

  “You can forget about me going with you to England. Our relationship’s over.”

  And without giving her mother any further right of reply, Windsong launches into the air like a cruise missile and disappears before her vanishing act even registers.

  Zephyr 13.3 “Human, All Too Human”

  IT’S DIFFICULT TO console my ex-wife, especially with her boyfriend watching. A big part of me wants to fold her into my arms, tell her everything’ll be alright. I can clearly see she would rather sob her frustrations to Harald. That douchebag part of me notes the careworn lines around her eyes and mouth, the first hint of frost she’s too proud to dye in her wild mahogany ringlets so much like our daughter’s more tawny, even more crazy tresses. Age is coming to our door, yet I am much as I was at twenty-five. The White Nine boffins have already made it clear I didn’t get any particular longevity boost when I got my powers. My advanced recuperative abilities have the same self-destruct mechanism coded in as the average Joe’s cells, no pun intended, or well, a bit intended, so it’s not like I am some Superman who walks among the common people unable to truly feel their humanity. I’m human as they come.

  Human, all too human, as Nietzsche would say.

  I leave them to it. I move off a distance, professional paranoia making me check for paparazzi, and oh yeah, lurking enemies of the forces of good.

  Mid-sweep, I give a massive bowel-weakening yawn. My eyes water, heart skipping a beat. Tired. Ready for bed, if not the grave.

  If I have any worldly possessions left, they are with Loren, and so I eye my way westward and throw myself into the ether, barely able to generate the will so much as the steam to hit Mach. I follow the Hudson to the waterfront, slamming down behind what locals like to call an early morning bar, disturbing two hirsute biker gentlemen making time for a little recreational anal sex. I fish a checked shirt from a dumpster and remove the mask, checking my reflection in the side mirror of a parked delivery truck to see faint black marks from the glue being there so long. A touch of spit and I’m alright, anonymous as any guy could be with a growing-out haircut, leather pants and a shirt that smells like it was retrieved from a corpse.

  It’s like a cemetery at my old waterfront digs. The fire escape leads to an open door which yawns inward to reveal drab daylight plucking over the scant furnishings, the bed a recent fire victim, a few articles of clothing amid fast-food containers that
smell of weeks gone by, if my nose tells me anything. I also smell piss and rats, which means the cat has gone and other feral animals have moved in.

  Loren is gone, I know not where.

  I stare at the blackened bed misty-eyed, rocking gently on my heels with fatigue.

  The refrigerator is gone too, pawned I would guess. This has every hallmark of a crack den short of actual crackheads or indeed people of any description.

  Then I notice on the wall, scrawled in mascara brush: Disappear Here.

  Cute.

  *

  FROM LOREN’S, THE only other place I could even consider calling home is in Astoria. I rocket through the brightening day, humidity clouding my skin as I pass through low scudding clouds, angling down like a Cold War nightmare, watching my shadow flicker over the once-familiar borough with a distraction only possible through sleep deprivation.

  It takes my third pass to confirm what has grown as a chilling conviction, gestated as a lunatic possibility in my brainstem to flower into a madness of certainty.

  My parents’ home is missing.

  By missing, I don’t just mean destroyed. I mean gone completely, and likewise the houses, in fact the streets around it.

  I land in the rags of my costume at a convenience store at which I once bought Sentinel comics and glass bottles of cola, the old Galaga machine as vanished as the street down which once a cold wind blew on autumn days as me and the other neighborhood hoods jostled and joked and wrestled and flipped quarters and the bird to passing cars. Carmichael Street is gone. Instead, a row of apartments I know once crept along the street-front one block up now fill that space. I’ve already gone overhead, so taking to the air once more won’t confirm anything but what I now know to be true.