“The spirit world is drawn closer to ours by sex and death, Zephyr,” Twilight says in between disturbingly timed grunts. “Grab one. Help out a little.”
“We are not having a gang bang here, Twilight,” I say churlishly. “Remember, I don’t exactly feel comfortable with all this.”
“OK, well grab Libby there with the candle and just choke her a little.”
“– the fuck?”
“It’s OK,” the woman says in a slurry voice, face and blonded hair showing from within the mask to reveal a woman probably my own age. “I don’t mind.”
“Well . . . you should.”
In that pregnant pause, the third so-called adept kneels before me and starts trying to wrangle my eel out of my trousers, but despite my costume confounding her fairly skilled efforts, I draw out of reach and growl with irritation.
“Can we get the fuck on with it, please, no pun intended?”
“OK, hang on,” Twilight says, and you guessed it, finishes up inside the woman he’s fucking, who looks around almost like she’s looking for something to read to pass the time.
Twilight shakes and wipes off on the edge of her robe and quickly slides back into his grey leggings, a fine sheen of sweat on his supernaturally broad and powerful torso. With a quick and somehow, despite what I’ve just witnessed, an engagingly shy look on his boyish features, he moves quickly into the middle of the complex diagram and assumes a yogic varasana pose with ease. He also produces the plastic deal bag with High Roller’s hairs inside, gesturing to the girl with the brazier to come forward.
Twilight starts to intone under his breath as I take a seat in one of the armchairs I angle on the spectacle at the circle’s edge. The hairs are tipped into the brazier. He takes the athame and runs it across his palm without hesitation, cupping his own hand expertly so the blood doesn’t immediately escape. The woman with the candlestick comes and puts the flame at the underside of his palm and Twilight says nothing, probably barely able to feel either the knife wound or the nascent flame, before he then swiftly and professionally tips the handful of blood into the brazier, murmurs more of the ghastly syllables I dare not and cannot and frankly don’t feel like repeating, accompanied by a slight puff of green smoke which vanishes just as quickly as it came.
“Bring the map,” Twilight says.
The chick he was balling knows her way around the chamber. She comes back with a huge old-fashioned atlas she lays on the floor open double before Twilight. He lifts the brazier and removes its fragile metal lid, swirling it like one might a fine brandy as he inhales the fumes and chants a little more, eyes closing as he focuses on my request.
“OK,” he says. “Show us what you’ve got.”
He finishes swirling the brazier abruptly, slamming it down on the floor in front of the open atlas. An indeterminate glob leaps into the air at the impact, but rather than spill, it lazily floats in the air above the book like bad CGI, slowly lowering feather-like to the left side of the map where it lands with a gentle plop.
I’m straining forward in my chair to see, but the dimness and the distance elude me. I can only make an educated guess.
“The Middle East?”
“Yeah,” Twilight says, mystified.
“Why the fuck would Matrioshka be in Afghanistan?”
Zephyr 18.9 “Satyriasis”
A DAY LATER, I am crowding into a Lear jet with various familiar and unfamiliar faces, greeted by our host, the multiple man Legion. Picture a handsome, preppy, completely unserious-looking superhero with the sole ability to make numerous copies of himself. He appears in six different locations in his green-and-black costume, an admittedly neat-looking style of headwear I once considered myself where the hair and face show, but the sides of the scalp, the forehead and chin are all covered. I cadge an actual glass of champagne from a tray that one of his copies holds and the surprised mannequin blinks at me.
“Well hello there, Zephyr. I’m not sure we’ve met.”
“Yeah, we just met over there,” I say and point to one of the other clones, just fucking with him really. He makes a face.
“I’m the one mind, multiple bodies. You can’t get by me like that.”
“I was only kidding,” I say.
“What are you doing here?” Legion asks. “I mean, you’re welcome and all that, but you can fly, right?”
“I can fly, but I don’t know where the fuck I’m going,” I tell him.
Legions laughs uproariously at that, nodding and nodding and each time I think he’s about to say something, nodding just a moment more like he’s doing a bad Nic Cage impersonation or maybe it’s just a very good one.
“Yeah, well I have transport and guides and everything arranged,” he says. “You’re going to love the retreat. I only came back to get my business in order and then come back, so, welcome. Welcome.”
He makes a half-assed plosio gesture despite carrying a silver tray of drinks and I hump my day pack over my shoulder and lumber into the plane, nodding to the other passengers who’ve taken up seats in the plush-upholstered Lear jet like little kids taking out whole rows and hoping no one else will sit down. I pass Heracleon, Stiletto and Portal, then stop in my tracks looking at a gorgeous curvy blonde in green and black wearing a black cat mask and elbow-length vinyl gloves.
“Holland?”
In her Cusp persona, Holland looks up at me with sexily furrowed brows. Just as she looks like she’s about to say something (and my gut instinct tells me it isn’t going to be good), I’m jostled from behind as Twilight of all people bundles onto the plane smelling of menthol liqueur and wood smoke. He clamps a big, black-gloved hand onto my shoulder and all but burps in my face.
“Hey move over Zeph, VIP comin’ through.”
And move through he does, slamming down like the eternal frat boy into the row of seats one back and across from Cusp. These two have history as well, so it’s an awkward moment. Under the Cliff Notes for this episode you’ll find a quick rehash of the time Twilight was using astral projection to possess one of his hot blonde groupies like a meat puppet so he could have vicarious hetero sex with me – I think they call that straight-on-straight sex now, right? – then dismissed the whole affair like it was no big deal.
“Well this is awkward,” I say.
“It doesn’t have to be,” Cusp says. “Go sit in the back with your idiot friend, Zephyr.”
“Holland . . . I mean Cusp, I really just want to –”
“Please quietly go to hell, OK?”
“Jeez, you’re a tough crowd, lady. I thought we had, you know, a groovy kind of –”
“Don’t even say it. Please.”
Holland sighs and sips the champagne flute she’s been given on arrival.
“I’m going to Afghanistan to get away from whack-job morons like you guys and try and get my damned life on track. Please sit down so I don’t have to look at you.”
“Shit,” I say, but I do as she asks, unwisely throwing fuel on my own fire by sagging down beside Twilight lounging as sloppily as space permits in the next row back.
“Girl sounds angry, pal. What did you do?”
I look at him, jaw locked in sudden rage as I shake my head wondering if his memory really is that poor or if it’s just part of the routine, and just as suddenly a bolt of clarity hits me and I realize Twilight is my own uniquely-crafted karmic punishment.
And I wonder if this is how people see me sometimes.
*
A STRANGE PHOBIA grips me as we cross the Atlantic, despite the fact that if everything goes to hell the next second as Cusp seems to be hoping, I’m perfectly able to fly to safety by myself. There’s a strange feeling of being caged and vulnerable within the claustrophobic rib struts of the millionaire’s plane. Downing most of a bottle of vermouth helps, not making me drunk, but giving me the heavy, sedated feeling I remember from Thanksgiving dinners back when my grandparents were alive and my powers were yet to kick in thanks to the lightning bolt that fate or Lennon
’s subliminal urgings ordained I should encounter.
A surliness descends on me as we listen to the buffeting winds outside and pass through a howling weather system, the plane rocking as Portal, Legion and Heracleon discuss their hopes and dreams for their visit to Sting’s Afghan retreat. Legion has the rather disturbing habit of breaking into multiple copies when excited, deliberately dominating the discussion with multiple voices he then expects to be silently excused by dint of his personal wealth and the fact we’re all basically flying at his expense. I sit in my plush seat as Twilight’s head lolls back and he snores like something designed by HR Giger as I sharpen my glare at Holland’s profile as she and Stiletto get into a subliminally women’s-only chat and the miles whip by.
At some point I fall asleep, waking up to the plane shaking. Our row is near the back door to the enclosed cabin where Legion must sleep, because the door hangs open and the skinny guy stands there wearing nothing but his envy-inducing headwear and a monogrammed towel, a fug of cologne about him as I peek into the well-lit luxury cabin and see three more copies of him completely naked engaged in what looks pretty much illegal still in some states.
“Anyone up for a little kinky fun? I already got started,” he says shamelessly.
Stiletto and Cusp lift heads, their hair fuzzy from contact with their seats, looking back myopically nonplussed as I elbow Twilight who snorts awake, utters “Wha–?” and looks in, seeing the same thing as me.
“I thought it might be your cup of tea,” I say bitterly.
“Any takers? Ladies?” Legion smiles.
“You look happy enough in there playing with yourself,” Stiletto says huskily.
“I didn’t know you were a fag, guy,” Twilight says, rubbing his eyes.
I snort at the temerity of the comment given his own past history, but Legion just smiles it off like he seems to deal with everything else that can’t be bought or seduced. I have to remind myself this guy’s technically a superhero, though admittedly I can’t remember the last time he actually did anything except attend movie premieres and magazine launches.
“Is jerking off gay? That’s all me in there. All of me.” He laughs again. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same in my situation. But you know, I’m up for more if anyone’s interested?”
I make the mistake of peeking back in and seeing one of his copies start cornholing another and I wince, no amount of lubricant ever going to make that vision less painful. I shake my head, hoping it’ll all just go away, and without any further interest, Legion does just that, shutting the cabin door as a strange kind of normalcy returns.
*
IT IS MORNING as we angle low over one of the most stunning landscapes I’ve ever seen, the heaven’s view of rumpled bed sheets capped with ice going hundreds of miles in every direction, the mountains of the Pakistan-Afghan border seemingly untrammeled by human habitation, though that is surely just an illusion from this altitude.
The chartered plane goes north and descends to a private airfield in the peaceful country, touching down and quickly taxiing to a row of low but tasteful buildings clearly designed with the wealthy international traveler in mind. We might be far from any major population centers here in Afghanistan’s interior, but the history of alternative-seeking wannabe mystics and more than a handful of narcotics enthusiasts has offered a steady trade since the dawn of the nineteenth century, give or take the interruption of the odd tribal war or two.
Some handsome, well-meaning young Afghani guys dressed like hotel bellhops are there for us as soon as the plane door folds down and we break our fasts on cold morning air, the magnificent mountains rising all around us, a peculiar crystalline quality to the light unfiltered by anything except a touch of dust rising with the sun.
Twilight steps down heavily beside me, tousled quiff a little less manicured than normal as he delicately tries to pick sleep from the eye holes of his mask.
“That was quick,” he says in a voice seemingly laced with egg nog.
“For you, maybe,” I say over my shoulder. “Shouldn’t you be home looking after the family business or something?”
“Na, that boy you sent me’s doing just fine,” Twilight says, less of that New England accent he often cultivates to strain out his mountain Wop pedigree. “I owe you a spotter’s fee or something for him, I’m sure. Oh, hang on,” he then says, a twinkle of mirth I know I’m not going to appreciate in the corner of his eye where moments before there was only crusty yellow crap. “You’re already sponging off me in those old dot-com digs, aren’t you? I forgot.”
“You forgot,” I mutter weakly.
“So cut down on the high and frickin’ sanctimonious, will you, Zeph?”
Twilight strides off, me suitably cut down to size yet again. I snarl and clash eyes with Cusp who’s already buddied up with Stiletto, who I’m pretty sure I read once in SuperScene magazine has some fairly serious lesbionic moves on her. I’m less likely to warn Holland than to try and find a way to watch, so I flex my best insincere smile, open to a little eye-fucking, but I cop only her most insolent glare and I move off as Legion descends from the jet making two of his copies carry his luggage.
“It’s good to be the king,” I hear him mutter to his own tittering laughter, the joke for no one’s benefit but his own – all three of him.
From around the back of the nearest building, two stretch Humvee limos appear. Me, Twilight and Legion clamber into one. Our host actually retains his copies to ensure all the seats are full, leaving the other masks to trudge twenty yards to the next vehicle in line, and then moments later we move at a steady clip through the harsh pink dust of the desert and climb into the approach for the first mountain pass.
The glass screen between us and the driver’s compartment slides down and for a moment I expect Ill Centurion or Phantasmagor or Black Jester or someone to protrude through, their dastardly plot revealed, but it’s just another one of these grinning Afghani hair models who inclines his head several times like a Mr Bobblehead.
“I am Aziz, kind and noble sirs. Please do not hesitate to inquire for any of your pecuniary needs.”
Legion (one of them) looks back at Twilight and I and laughs. “Pecuniary?”
“Of or pertaining to financial concerns,” the young Afghani says. “For instance, we have the world’s most premium opiates growing in the garden of Eden that is Afghanistan, the flower of the East.”
“Hmm, brother,” Twilight says in a chesty voice. “We might be friends yet.”
“Careful, though,” I say, petulance irrepressible as I make a show of craning my neck looking around. “I don’t see any hot chicks you can possess if you need to get to know Aziz further.”
Twilight elbows me moderately hard (we feel the limo rock). Then he swings his brawny arm around my shoulder and pulls me in close.
“You know, Zeph,” he says, “you mention our shady past so much I can’t work out if you miss it, or if you’re just jilted it wasn’t more straight out man-on-man action.”
“The only man-on-man shit we’ve ever done happened not too long after, if you recall, and you’re the one who came out worse off,” I hiss and pull free.
“That’s not how I remember it,” he says. “Titchy, aren’t ya?”
I shake my head, hating my own little bitch persona as I swivel my glare out the window at the crenulated desert swinging by, but I can’t contain it.
“I’ve gotta get some air,” I mutter again and work the sun roof, squirming up out of my seat and jetting into the sky.
Zephyr 18.10 “The Being Within”
STING’S HOLY SEE is hidden high in the mountains, the air rarefied like a commodity that might be sold on clandestine street corners back home, and from half a mile in the air with the setting sun cutting between the silhouetted purple mountains I see the makings of a small hillside village that has agglomerated like some weird carbuncular growth along the approach to an unnaturally levelled-out area, a huge shelf embedded or indeed a part o
f the elevated landscape, a backdrop of huge plinths of natural stone like a rock waterfall a thousand yards high, and into which some earlier version of what passes for civilization around here once burrowed, producing a network of ledges and cave mouths, and most surprising of all, in amongst them stand a series of gigantic Buddhas, six in all, their robed and eroded arms reflecting a range of sublime gestures, each one an indicator back to a forgotten antiquity that frankly befuddles me here in the middle of a predominantly Muslim country.
I shadow the two Humvees as they crawl up the pass and enter the small mud-walled township, front stoops addressing the street, a number of itinerant children and old men crowding around the vehicles making their transit, and though from up above the impact is lessened somewhat, I am almost as shocked as I was by the huge statues to see several of the premises are actually air-conditioned bars, the glow of neon and television emanating in the early evening light as bored-looking local men line up glasses and check their stock. The other houses are just as conspicuously in on the action, with kebab shops, a convenience store and a chemist sitting uncomfortably beside yoga studios, homeopath clinics and an honest-to-God Turkish bath house here in the middle of nowhere. Worse, once the initial anesthetic of unfamiliarity wears off, I see two erstwhile costumed avengers squatting on a door step smoking cigarettes and chatting, while a woman with cascading platinum blonde hair stands outside the Seven-11 gesticulating into a cell phone, an ice-cream in her other hand. None of them I recognize, but sweeping lower, I discern the woman talking in Italian. The two dudes sitting down give an obscure wave, but by then the Humvees are circling the big open space at the base of the assembled Buddhas, so I continue across and land on the hard-packed dust, craning my neck, mouth open like any other redneck tourist at the monumental historicity overwhelming above, the weather unkind but perhaps recent time even more harsh to these surrounding vales.
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