“I’m not even sure I’m really hearing you,” I say stoically.
“You’d need to clean yourself up. Are you interested? I could spot you maybe . . . A few hundred? You need a night at the Mercator or something?”
“I don’t have anywhere to go, Hallory. What are you suggesting?”
“You need to get back on your feet, Zephyr. You’ve got the best heart and you don’t even know it. But somewhere along the way you got sucked in by the whole hero-thing and forgot you need to live too, and that means having a life. Do you understand?”
“I understand you seem to be suggesting me using my status as some kind of male prostitute’s a much better course of action for me than saving the world from the next extra-celestial manifestation, if I’m hearing you right. . . .”
At the rebuke, Hallory’s open demeanor shuts up tight and she retrieves a fold of fifty-dollar bills from her purse while clicking away her Heather de Mills platinum cigarette case and Zippo. Between elegant chartreuse-nailed fingertips she waves the temptation before me.
“One-time only offer,” Hallory says like a ghostly voice from the recent past.
I hesitate, but we both know where this is going. Even if I decide to stiff her, Hallory knows I’m taking the money and so do I. It lets her assuage her guilt and write the cost off to the company all at the same time. Like a bear snapping salmon in the river, I snag the $300 and she tells me the room number the agency uses and I nod, exhaustion my major driver as she bustles away with a sweet look belying her inner guile and the Croatian motherfucker gives me the Maori chin-nod tough guy routine and a gull screams past like the premonition of some ancient doom and the city descends into night taking me with it.
Zephyr 13.6 “Happenstance And Tomfoolery”
THERE IS NO way I’m pawning my posterior for anyone, but I sleep like a corpse once I finish dining on three trolleys of room service and a bottle of merlot. I’m lucky I don’t shit the silk sheets as I sleep through two days and a night while the pay-per-view drones and the snuggly luxury of someone else’s credit card charges adds to the ease and depth of my slumber as effectively as a harem of fin-de-siècle Paris courtesans whispering bardic praise poems into my ear. I wake as the city does, or at least as the sun rises, a remote globe barely able to manage its way through the all-encompassing smog.
In the last few hours of sleep I’ve undergone that groggy denial that takes you in the early hours, what I imagine wage slaves (sorry guys) experience in the first morning light knowing that in an hour or two they have to strap themselves into the mundane catapult and hurl themselves into the most unnatural environment known to mankind. Thoughts, confusing, rambling and jumbled, cartwheeling through the backyard theatre of my mind as my unconscious grapples with what my waking self clearly wants to avoid. Lennon. Strummer. My mothers. The list is endless. Beth. Tessa. Loren. Holland. Hell, even Annie Black registers a residual twinge of guilt. I’m not even sure she came and I’ve always fancied myself a gentleman in that way, reading Woody Allen’s comment in an old Playboy when I was young about always letting his fantasies cum first, something that went up my flag-pole early in life, aided and abetted by the breeze of two dyke mums who openly discussed everything from the Schrödinger’s Cat question of their own g-spots, through to genital mutilation among the refugee women of the then-nascent No Man’s Land republic to our north.
The bad taste in my mouth comes back to an irrefutable truth. At some point in recent time – since I returned from Matrioshka’s parallel – the invisible entities I’ve never even met took it on themselves to erase my childhood home from existence.
Chances are they erased a few dozen other properties and their owners’ lives in the process. An invisible toll I am literally unable to fathom. As taciturn as I might’ve been with Streethawk, this latest tragedy writ small isn’t something I can easily let go. I know this. But the never-ending parade of world-shaking problems started not long after I was hit with a thunderbolt at age sixteen and hasn’t let up yet. I know writers have the adage “make a list and prioritize”. It’s good advice I’ve never applied to the dressing-up-in-spandex business. I’ve been like a little kid chasing seagulls most my life, running around madly and never getting none. God knows what a kid would do with the gull if he caught one. And maybe I’m the same. These crises are a great distraction from anything like a real life, though by sheer happenstance and tomfoolery I’ve accumulated most the accoutrements of such an existence anyway: a wife, now an ex, a daughter, who now wishes she was an ex, but admittedly precious little else. I couldn’t tell you what happened with the financials with the apartment after our marriage broke down. I don’t have the patience for legal papers. And now I’m homeless.
Boring, I know.
Can this Strummer guy really be my father? And how do I feel about that? How strong is the bond I’ve developed to the Preacher Man, who spent my entire life inside my skull, and what does that say about him and me if our whole relationship is based on a lie? I need more info, damn it.
I shower, eat more room service, sit in a Zen-like trance while watching Tom Cruise murder the scenery in the Matrix, that powerful Freudian unconscious like some vast extra-dimensional engine room itself.
Slowly, a plan forms. Not much of one, but hey, we gots to start somewhere, right?
But there’s also all those other loose threads to deal with. Getting shit together starts today. And my time’s running out before Hallory O’Hagan realizes I’m not going to be pimped out by her, or at least not for a measly $300.
I grab the phone, take a deep breath, and call Beth.
*
THE LONG AND the short of it is she hasn’t seen Tessa either. I ask a few pointed details about financials and drop Pete Liebenthal’s name even though I haven’t actually met the lawyer yet. These lawyers really are like sharks and each of them knows the names of the other apex predators in local waters. Liebenthal’s a name that gives even Elisabeth a second’s pause and we manage to mumble our way through playing like adults and Beth outlines an agreement to annex some of the funds once the sale of our apartment goes through. It’s a case of Beth wearing the pants again. Hell, she’s in pants and I’m in diapers, but it means there’ll be a few thousand when the times comes that I know WTF I’m actually doing with it.
Yeah, slipped a bit of Internet lingo in there. I’m down with the kids.
The call ends brokenly, Beth with more important things she needs to do that she’s strangely too polite to make clear, and me with nothing better to do really, but trying to make out like that’s not the case.
I sit on the end of the luxurious bed, news about pepper being the world’s greatest unknown carcinogen or some such shit dominating the networks, then the Enercom phone lights up with a random number. Ordinarily I’d ignore the call. I have to get Tessa to delete my missed calls or otherwise the phone stops working, weighed down by the sheer bulk of nonsense data, but I’m fey enough to take the call this time and the guy who runs my website is more surprised than me to find me on the other end of the line.
“Zephyr, it’s Daniel. I’ve been trying to call on and off for weeks.”
“Uh-huh. Hi Danny. How’s it been?”
“Um, OK. Thanks for asking. There’s a guy been goin’ crazy for tryin’ to get hold of you through the message boards. You know normally I’d user-block these freaks, but there’s somethin’ about this one . . . Thought you should know.”
I tell Danny thanks and go to hang up, but he’s determined to give me the details. A name and a number. An address where he eats lunch each day. Vague threats about a threat to our parallel. He also mentions the guy can explain who the Latin-speaking dude in the gold cape was who handed me my ass atop the Silver Tower. It’s only the last that really jimmies open my interest, me frowning into the mirror opposite the bed as my hotel room door opens inwards seemingly of its own volition and Streethawk walks in eating a chili dog and carrying a stained doggie bag with two more inside. I ditch
Danny, some hokum about how I hope he likes the new wheelchair, then remember that’s another guy I’m thinking of as I sign off amid his confusion, me slipping the phone back into my pooled leathers like the shed skin of some great shit-stinking reptilian beast at the foot of the bed. I turn to Streethawk wearing just my tattered Zephyr top, my mask and boxers as he passes me the hotdogs.
“Hey ‘Hawk. What’s up?”
“I know you’d eaten, but I couldn’t pass these up. So good.”
I bust open the paper bag and start on the first hotdog like it’s some chef’s masterpiece, however much it resembles the miscarried offspring of some alien lifeform. Streethawk grins at my ever-reliable appetite as he brushes the tips of his fingers over the pooled duvet.
“Jeez, actually usin’ the bed for sleepin’ in, Zeph? That’s unlike you. I guess you got it out of your system when you pumped it into Miss Black’s, huh?”
“How the fuck do you know about that?” I asks somewhat pointlessly to the man to whom the city whispers all our secrets.
I growl at my own foolishness and stop eating when I notice grit on the end of the chili dog and peer back into the bag to see some kind of flaky ash in the bottom.
“Fucking hell, ‘Hawk. Dumpster diving again?”
“I forget not everyone has the ability to convert any urban matter to fuel. Sorry Zeph,” he replies with a sly grin.
It redoubles as he watches me gag and throw the end of the hotdog back in the bag and pass it to him.
“I hope my puke on your shoes counts as urban matter, you sorry sack of jilted dick-sucking ambitions.”
“Oh my dick-sucking ambitions are going just fine,” Streethawk grins and bares slightly yellowed teeth, a hint of decay in his otherwise batteredly handsome smirk.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Ha, nice segway, Zephyr.”
“I think you mean ‘segue,’ but anyway --”
“If I wanted to suck your dick, you’d be mine in a heartbeat.”
“Fuck you, ‘Hawk.”
“That what Twilight said before you ate his pussy, motherfucker?”
I fume. I mean, Jesus, there’s literally fucking nothing this guy doesn’t know. He’s got me and he knows it. Unrepentantly. But after a moment the sallow smile furls and he rests his bony ass against the dresser.
“The Clockwork King wasn’t behind the attack at your mom’s house,” he says.
“No? They looked like his –”
“Oh, they were his toys, for sure. He’s taking outside contracts these days.”
“Contracts?”
I don’t like the way this one’s sounding.
“That’s right. Someone’s put a price on your head.”
“Someone? You can do a Venn diagram of who’s tasted my spunk, so spill with the ID of the employer, ‘Hawk.”
“I’m afraid I can’t. Study that sentence real careful-like,” Streethawk answers. “I can’t tell you. I don’t know. And even that gives me pause.”
*
SO SOMEONE WHO isn’t known to Atlantic City wants me dead. I chew on this for a minute while Streethawk finishes going down on his dumpster catch, then he calmly announces he’s going to use my facilities for a shit. It sounds like Orcas mating in there, finishes with an air-horn squeal, those vuvuzelas that were so amazing (irony) during the South African World Cup.
Streethawk emerges like a refugee from the Real, dainty wipes on paper towels with his battle-scarred mitts.
“The good news is I’m back on solids,” he says.
I nod, trying to maintain a somber tone.
“If there’s a contract on my head, sorry for putting you into it.”
“It’s OK. Needed the exercise. Surprises like that keep me sharp.”
“You could do me a favor,” I tell him.
Streethawk raises his notched eyebrow. I don’t like asking either, but he’s a resource and I need every helping hand I can get.
“I need you to find Loren for me. Seeker.”
“Uh-huh.”
To his credit, he doesn’t ask why, doesn’t raise that whole deflowering-the-chick-who-was-meant-to-save-us-from-the-alien-apocalypse thing.
“Where’s the last place you saw her?”
I give him the address for the warehouse loft. He nods, tossing the paper towels onto the mountain of food service and picking up a straw he chews on like it’s a bread stick.
“OK. See you in the funny pages,” he says with a wink and exits.
The moving feast of my own clusterfucks continue to pile up about me. After Streethawk’s gone I shower, make a few calls and arrange for a fresh uniform to be made up pronto and sent over to the hotel, vague assurances about future payment my only real line of credit at the moment. As I rummage through the drawers and stare at the hotel bible I’ve uncovered like some archaeologist of the mundane, the good book a lab specimen that could sprout god-knows-what (no pun intended) in a petri dish, the news feed on the TV switches to breaking content. I slowly drink in the elements of the everyday transformed into a horror story for someone somewhere.
Until slowly I realize that part of its for me.
Zephyr 13.7 “Spirits In The Material World”
“WE HAVE CROSSED live to a shocking development at the upstate private retreat for television personality Bryant Gumbel. Early reports still to be confirmed put the popular broadcaster as one of several victims in a violent homicide.”
I stare at the television. The aerial view. Helicopter’s shadow a rotating crucifix over the palatial estate, horse stables, Spanish ranch houses and red-tiled garage complex completely out of place in the hinterlands of what was once New York State.
True to form, like every other member of The Twelve, Gumbel, who I met as Fortress in that other parallel has done well for himself in this reality. As I feverishly understand it, The Twelve saw the nightmare their tyrannical rule could become and through the Doomsday Man’s trickery – a casual manipulation I can now well understand now I’ve experienced it myself – he parlayed that moral second guess into a Devil’s pact with the extra-dimensional subspace-dwelling Editors to collapse two radically different, but otherwise entirely compatible parallels into one. The deal was simple: each would adopt a new successful but mundane guise and (whether they knew it or not) leave their memories of gallantry and god-power behind as they slipped into normal life like a suicide into a warm bath.
Except Arsenal is killing them. Killing them like he killed my mother. Killed Synergy. Nearly killed Loren.
I look down and find some hooker’s discarded lipstick, the only thing seemingly available to write with in this otherwise well-appointed suite.
Shaking-handed, I start a list on the mirror above the dresser.
1. Avenge my mother’s murder.
2. Get custody of Tessa.
3. Kill Arsenal.
4. Find Loren.
5. Find somewhere to live.
6. Who is Strummer?
7. Look for the King/101ers.
I stare at the blurry list for long moments, trying to articulate to myself how I’m meant to make reversing the erasure of my childhood a dot point in my Eighteenth Century PowerPoint. I dare not even write “destroy the Editors” lest I invoke them, showing the same paranoia shared by my nemeses in the other parallel where they feared to even mention planet-brained psionic Matrioshka in case she materialized.
The list’s a good start, though I’m sure there’s prudent points I’ve forgotten in the haze of my own fury. At a knock on the door I take receipt of my new leathers, leaving the jacket open to show the tattered tee I’ve been wearing all this time and admiring my newfound punk visage, leaning in close to electrocute my stubble back to a bare minimum.
The man in the mirror isn’t just a bad pop song.
The man in the mirror looks like someone you don’t wanna fuck with, and I like that just fine.
*
I’M ABOUT TO avanti when the hotel room phone rings. I pause
, for all intents and purposes about to simply dive out the window and away, but reluctance gets the better of me and I return from curiosity to answer.
It’s Hallory O’Hagan.
“You’re still in the room, aren’t you?”
“Well, self-evidently,” I say.
“You’ve got no intention of meeting the hosts I was talking about, do you?”
“Not right now.”
I hear Hallory’s cute sigh, the tongue pressed gently against the tiny gap between her perfect white teeth.
“I’ve been sitting here watching our corporate credit card bleed dry on online banking. When were you going to let me know, Zephyr?”
“You’re a smart girl,” I say. “You figured it out for yourself. Actually, I was just on my way. I have to return some videos.”
“No one calls them that any more,” Hallory says, distracted. “OK Zephyr. You drive a hard bargain, but something else’s come up. It’d be perfect for you.”
“Big paycheck, minimal effort?”
“Big paycheck, minimal morals, I was actually thinking,” she replies archly.
“My morals are fine, babe. It’s just my ethics which are sometimes flexy. You buy lunch and I might be willing to listen.”
At her tsk, I add, “I’m the commodity. Me, remember? I have to be feted.”
“Fated?”
“No. Feted.”
I try to inflect to convey the difference and end up sounding like Julian instead. The thought about Lennon’s dead mad kid strikes a glum chord. I literally shake my head.
“OK, again you win. I’d say Silver Tower, but someone’s removed that option lately,” Hallory replies. “Crayons at 2pm?”
“Pencil me in.”
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