“Stop,” I say pathetically.
She doesn’t stop. In fact, she seems to go into overdrive, becoming a blur as I fend off eye gouges, throat chops and knife-hand strikes to all my vulnerable parts. In close, I batter her once with an elbow, but the sensation is like swinging punches in a wind tunnel, the feeling that none of my hits really connect confirmed by the bitch keeping on coming like an Energizer Bunny on angel dust. I manage to fend off a few more fatalities, but when I retaliate in kind I’m left feeling geriatric and off-kilter and she’s simply nowhere near where she needs to be if I am getting out of this alive.
*
TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE, Whisperer is also surprisingly strong for a speedster. I get the sense – what little sense I can sift from anything in battlefield mode, my arms and legs and ribs aching from repeated hits – that the Bug controlling her like a human Playstation is right in the zone, reading and discarding tactics by the second from the playbook of her deep unconscious the creature sifts from a direct interface with Whisperer’s cerebellum. So when she suddenly quits it with the thirty-six crazy fists routine and grabs me in a cross-wristed jiujitsu hold and uses that centrifugal force of hers to twist and throw me around, a nearly forgotten element of my training from the prehistoric past lights within me and I execute the perfect defense, crouching and slipping down under her forearms to swing my arm around her throat, my other arm sliding like a bolt through the loop of her arms to pin them to the side and behind her back, levering her back, feet leaving the ground by dint of my superior height, and for all the monster controlling her’s surprise, its machinations are intangible so there’s no counter-weight it can use to stop me once I have her pinned back and wriggling and kicking her feet six inches above the ground.
There is nothing for it but to light her up. The first charge channeled through every cell in my body is like a split second in the electric chair – enough to disrupt her synapses and maybe make her void herself, white really not the color for that, her limbs making like dying fish twitching trapped tight within the vice of my arms. Whisperer takes a deep breath, noise like a dead person coming back to life, and when she writhes some more vying desperately for escape, I tighten the hold as I ransack my mind for solutions other than the grim finality that looks to be the only option left.
It is too awful to call it ironic that moments before I contemplated murder and found myself lacking, and now necessity is the mother, not of invention, but homicide as I enforce crushing strength about the French woman’s throat, her forearms flapping uselessly, her super speed no help, unable to get any leverage against me with her feet missing contact, that familiar quasi-perceptual sense of looming mortality thrumming like a bowstring through her muscles as I tighten further and further.
“I’m sorry.”
And just as I start to exert nearly decapitating pressure, my ear drums pop and Whisperer goes completely limp and I sense as much as see her tormenter withdraw in as much panic as I’m able to perceive in these weird alien creatures. Completely disengaged, the Bug whirls on its back legs, a carapace of eyes lighting on me for a moment as if committing my features to its racial memory before it scuttles off out the chamber.
It is a stay of execution for Whisperer.
I ease her gently to the floor as she twitches and moans, a hand to her own throat nearly crushed beyond redemption moments before. Her other hand clasps feverishly at my arm as she shakes off death to grab me wild-eyed in confirmation she not only lives, but is herself again.
“Où est-il?” she stammers agog. “Est-il parti?”
I remember enough of my rudimentary French to reassure Whisperer that she has her liberty. She clutches me as I help her to stand, weak as a newborn foal, and I realize she has no memory of what’s happened nor where she is.
And Twilight’s right. She has an incredible ass.
*
I DON’T MIND saying I am relieved that strangling a female superhero to death is not a required feature of my day. In my halting high school patois – and strenuously avoiding the grammatological torture of either past or future tense – I manage to bring Whisperer in a roundabout way to the understanding she is in Afghanistan, she was under the control of giant insects from subspace, and that I do, in fact, have a big yellow pencil. And after gathering her breath and finding somewhere discreet to relieve herself, for her part Whisperer finally admits she also speaks English.
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
“Well, you were tryin’ so hard,” she says in a cute-as-fuck accent that I’m not even going to try and emulate.
“You could’ve stepped in, back when I reverted to that sort of human Pictionary to explain the giant insects,” I say. “I’m not a professional mime, you might have guessed.”
She smiles and I am flattered by it, like a total fool, even as her expression reveals a pained edge. She gently rubs her bruised throat. I like to think I gave as good as I got, though I’m not telling her that. I’d rather my injuries remained mysterious for a little while longer.
“The good news is the frigging Bug-thing gave up its hold on you,” I say.
“I do not understand why,” Whisperer answers.
I only wiggle my eyebrows like a young Tom Selleck, keeping that particular mystery to myself as well in case I need to exorcise St George and Shade by way of near-death experience too. I can only glean there’s a risk for Lennon’s monsters in following their puppets down death’s rabbit hole.
Whisperer explains that her last memory is of being at Sting’s mansion in England’s north.
“I don’t even remember anyone raising the alarm,” she says, bewildered her standard setting for now.
“We should head back,” I say.
“But what do I do? These . . . people . . . they expect me to have a Bug on me, non?”
I look her up and down again, this time not just assessing her assets. As my Enercom phone starts ringing (I silence the tone as I draw it from my belt), I have to acknowledge what she says is true.
“We’re going to have to play it by ear.”
“Fantastique,” she replies in her charmingly droll accent. “And it will be my ass on the line.”
Like some Pavlovian response, my eyes drop to her ass for a moment and I am still pondering the aesthetic of dressing in white – and choosing the name Whisperer when she’s a speedster – when my eyes lift to meet her disapproving but not entirely unsurprised scowl.
“I’ve got to get this call,” I tell her, turning away to conceal a sheepishness I frankly don’t feel.
Zephyr 19.5 “Welcome To Hell”
WHISPERER AND I weave our way back through the cave network as I field the call from my daughter in Atlantic City. Tessa has the vocal tone typical to teenagers trapped by wet weather and poor choices on TV. You’d almost be forgiven for forgetting she was a weather controller living independently despite being (she tells me) seventeen years old.
“Honey,” I try to explain as I negotiate a bend, all James Bond and shit with Whisperer behind me probably because she knows I’ll have one eye on her derriere if she takes the lead, and perhaps also misguidedly mistaken that I have any idea about a way out of here. “This isn’t exactly the greatest time.”
“I told you I wanted to talk to you some more about my book.”
“Your book?” I ignore Whisperer’s raised brows. “Now’s not the time.”
“When is the time with you, dad? Come on.”
“What does your little girlfriend think?”
“Please don’t talk about Syzygy like that,” Tessa says. “The book is my opportunity to really come out as your daughter. Don’t you realize that?”
“And just ‘coming out’ in general, right?”
“Come out? No way,” Tessa says, sounding more seven than seventeen. “I’m not even going to talk about that.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“What are you saying, dad? You want me to expose my private life like that for the whole world
to see?”
Ordinarily at this point with anyone else I would have the very human response to grind the other person’s nose in their hypocrisy. As I like to tell myself often – call it my lifeline to sanity – I think sometimes I’m a better dad than I am a human being. So I take a deep breath, accidentally meeting Whisperer’s gaze again and shrugging and rolling my eyes as if to say “Kids, you know?” even though she hasn’t heard half the conversation.
“Maybe you should talk it over with your girlfriend and we can catch up when I get back from my mission.”
Tessa makes a scoffing noise.
“No, seriously, I am on a mission, honey,” I say.
Whisperer scowls. “Are you getting off the phone?”
“And who was that?” Tessa blathers in my ear. “Is she French? Jesus dad, you’re incorrigible.”
“No, Tessa, I am just critically misunder-fucking-stood. I’ll call you, OK?”
And just to prove what an asshole I am, I disconnect before she can reply.
“About time,” my copine says and flounces off past me in the lead.
Eyes on her tail, I jog behind to keep up.
*
IT’S PAST LUNCH time and so I am not surprised that when we reach civilization again, the hall where tables and chairs are set for the retreat’s cafeteria is pretty much empty, just a handful of Afghan women mopping and stacking chairs, two old guys at a table in the corner playing chess or mah jong or something. Working pretty much on sign language alone, I manage to cadge a couple of lukewarm TV dinners from the women at the kitchen counter and Whisperer and I devour them standing together, eyes on the exit, feeding our base needs all the while wondering if Lennon’s giant predatory parasites will come scuttling in from outside at any moment.
“What now?” Whisperer says, surprisingly finishing her foil pack before me.
“I have to find Twilight. Tell him what I found.”
“Why?”
I ponder the answer to that for long enough that Whisperer quite rightly assumes it’s never coming. She takes my tray as I finish and crunches them carefully together, dumping on the counter as I catch on to her departure and again find myself hurrying to keep up. I guess that’s what I get for taking up with a speedster. Even her slowest fast-walk forces me to rush.
“Where are you going?” I ask in her wake.
“To find Sting,” she says.
“But I freaking told you, damn it, he’s not exactly himself right now.”
“Then we’ll ask his usurper where to find him.”
I pour on a brief burst of speed of my own to grab the Frenchwoman by the arm. She rears back like we’re going to have to go ten rounds all over again, but when I see her face, it’s more aghast from fresh trauma than actually outraged that I’ve laid hands on her. The look’s mollifying in an instant. I hold up both hands.
“Listen, we have to think seriously about our approach here,” I say.
Whisperer might say more, but our travels have taken us back into the main thoroughfare just within the prime cave mouth and a dozen-or-so masks of different stripes pass back and forth within earshot so that we find ourselves play-acting being just regular folks, which is a ridiculous contradiction if ever there was. The routine devolves into Whisperer and I mutely staring at each other, she blowing out her cheeks, me doing that adorable eyebrow-raising thing of mine, her impatiently watching the crowds go by and me putting fists on hips as I faux casually lean in and whisper:
“If you rush headlong into this, you’ll end up with one of those Bugs up that sweet Continental ass of yours quicker’n you can blink, OK buttercup?”
“Then tell me, m’sieu Zephyr, what is the fucking plan?”
I give a shrug, falling in with the line of human traffic headed for the stairwell descending to the main yoga hall or whatever it is, hoping against hope we might evade our alien interlocutors by blending in with the rest of the sheep.
*
TURNS OUT THE main hangar is in full session. With the late arrivals trickling down ahead of me, I freeze halfway down the stairs as I catch a look at Sting and his cronies Shade and St George fronting a class of about a hundred-or-so costumed fuckwits each on their own meditation mat. Everyone is cross-legged, palms open on their knees, inner eyes closed as they try to imagine kundalini serpents rimming them or something. In freezing, I also block Whisperer above me, and just as Shade’s eyes swing my way, the French woman backtracks as fast as she can without breaking the sound barrier to leave me alone like an asshole on the downward stretch as I take in the prosaic normalcy of my one-time lover staring at me with that unblinking black-eyed look of hers I might find sultry if I didn’t have to imagine the gigantic alien parasite positioning her like a puppet – and imagine I do, because I realize any residual spark of Twilight’s magic potion has evaporated.
“Zephyr?” Shade calls. “Please join us. You are not too late.”
And so, looking as insouciant as I can (and let’s face it, I’ve got that shit in spades), I whistle softly and glance back upstairs to confirm Whisperer is as gone as last week’s milk. Then I trundle down and give a pained sorry-I’m-late smile and move to one of the mats in the middle that Shade indicates with her ebon hand.
I settle into a cross-legged position, knees protesting as I casually yank off my boots like so many others have done. Lennon-as-Sting’s adamantium gaze alights on me and for one awful moment I think he knows exactly what I’ve been up to – he is one of the world’s greatest living telepaths, after all. But then his gaze continues to move over the heads and faces of my brethren here and the psionic monologue resumes.
Welcome to hell.
Zephyr 19.6 “The Grand Delusion”
CLOSE YOUR EYES. Keep them closed. Don’t think. I understand how hard that might be, but concentrate on your breath and anticipate the next thought. Think about your next thought. Be present with it. Anticipate it. See how your mind trembles? Your thoughts will not come. You are in the Now, beautifully and hopelessly free of the thoughts and feelings that enslave you. There are no problems in the Now. Problems are the mind’s construction to keep you trapped in worry and constant thinking so you will not abandon it, but there are no problems in the Now. You must trust this with your whole Being. Unless you are desperately ill or dying, right at this very moment that evolves with you, living and breathing with you, there are no problems. If you are cold or thirsty or tired or sad you may feel these things or act to relieve them, but they are not problems. Problems are a construct of the future and the future will come to be the Now when and wherever the time arises. Concentrate on the sound of my voice. Do not think, and if you must think, return as the outsider to witness your thoughts and your reactions to them and your feelings about them. They belong to your mind and you are not your mind because you are a Being wholly and distinctly separate to mad rambling and fear-mongering. The true You I wish you to honor is outside of these thoughts. You are your pure Being and your powers are but the most momentary manifestation of a greater state of Being you must isolate from your mind and your feelings lest you become trapped forever in the world of the future and its imaginary and illusory problems that your mind seeks to convince you are real so that you will continue to rely on it and remain trapped. You do not need its guidance. You are free if only you can believe and accept and free yourself from the tyranny of the petty small-minded and fearful voice that haunts you even in your sleep. I should know, because I have done this and you have seen your brothers and sisters do this here while on the mountain-top with me. Breathe. Think if you must, but return to that outsider state. Be bemused by the panic and trill sound of that voice, and if you feel drawn in by its constant complaints, focus on your body and feel where the anxiety and worry and nervousness rest and draw your breath into that part of your body, what we call the pain-body, imagining that clean mountain air you draw in like the light that fills you and is in fact the truth of your Being. Ascend with that light as you empty your thoughts and al
low your Being to soar, climbing your spine, radiating from each chakra with the light of your true self as you ascend to your skull, and through your brain and eyes and ears and nose imagine that light shining out and the beautiful free eternal Being that is you emerging from your head like a beautiful rainbow serpent shedding its skin and abandoning the mind and the emotions and the worry and stepping out into the light of the eternal cosmic Now. Try it. Do not think. Seize the ladder within you and drink in the clean air and ascend, my fellow supermen and women. Ascend.
*
THE VOICE HAS a hypnotic quality I study skeptically, aware of the salesman lurking within Sting’s own skull, the grand irony of the very Now he preaches, foisting the grand delusion upon his followers at the same time as preaching the truth. Yet as the psychic drone passes through me and the others, I find I’m caught up quite deliberately and consciously by what he is saying, that the very reasonableness of his words have a ring of truth to them, that this is not mind control or psionic projection or some trick of the rarefied air or an appeal to the weakness within all of us or a taking advantage of our collective gullibility and wish for things to be better and more meaningful or less shit or less hollow or more constructively useful and purposeful in our lives, but instead that even despite my own practicality I am drawn in while that very same part of my supposed Being to whom he appeals remains aloof and not drawn in, quietly standing like the skeptical witness he describes casting judgement on even his own monologue, and yet finding a disturbing inner resonance that lures me like a fish to the hook, the magpie to the glittering thing, perhaps as much a question of my own lifelong sensitivity to such suggestion as I shake off the interpellation and look around as if a full day and night has passed and my fellow rejects from the Real are nodding off, utterly bewitched as these poor pitiful souls struggle to accomplish this task that may very well be just as illusory as the hurt child within me fears it to be.
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