I think possibly I have taken too much MDMA.
I’m probably the last one to notice we have been joined by the robot – and his creator. Dr Prendergast looks completely out of his element in the chic confines of the city’s most exclusive club. It’s normally $40 to get in, though Chancel waives our fees. It’s good press. Young gods choose to party at the Tower. Amadeus even makes an appearance in his leonine smoking jacket and effete cigarillo, inquiring if Twilight is amongst us, vaguely disappointed when he isn’t. Twilight has that dangerous allure that doesn’t exactly go hand-in-hand with saving kittens and appearing on postcards to promote the preservation of the Jersey Ferry. I remind myself of Twilight’s words: I’m an anti-hero, OK?
Also in the club: Julian Gaddafi, Paris Hilton, Denzel Washington, the Olsen Twins, Jackie Chan, Joey Wong and Yuen Biao, Axel Rose, Russell Crowe, Courtney Cox, Courtney Love (no baby this time), John Cusack, Scott Wolf, mutant basketballer Shaquille O’Neal, Maria Sharapova, the guy who played Avon in Blake’s Seven, an Australian TV gardening expert, and a man who may or may not be the former villain Hunchback with new teeth, a tan, a facelift and different-colored eyes. We also see Black Honey and her goon squad of Portal, Falconer, Nightwind and Devil Betty, shooting evil glances and motioning furiously for Paragon to go over and speak to them. It turns out Sky Blue has been downgraded from critical at the hospital, but I think we’re all too stoned to care, if we ever did.
After a few Stolis, it becomes obvious Professor Prendergast isn’t here to party. I’ve barely spoken to Chamber all night. I’m disappointed his big contribution to the crisis was turning himself into a public address system. Prendergast keeps trying to get Chamber alone and I can hear him raising his voice over a dance remix of Godspeed! You Black Emperor’s Slow Riot for New Kanada. The words “N-space” and “my robot’s vulnerabilities” are all that’s needed. For some reason, Chamber seems palpably confronted by the errant scientist and at something like 2am he storms out of the Tower, beyond range of Stalemate’s invisible damper field, and disappears over the edge of the landing platform. I’m going to assume it isn’t suicide.
Hermes stands out like a straight-edge punk at a gay orgy, watching everything that happens with an impenetrable stare, Neo-Classical visage unable to form even the rudiments of a human response. This is no coincidence. I gather he would be unable to experience emotions anyway, so the impression I have of his internal confusion or torment is just suckyness on my behalf and probably the drugs. He doesn’t want a hug from me and when I send Cusp over, the whole crowd erupts in laughter at his inept response. She is well and truly in on the act and I find myself warming to her immensely, appreciation now well beyond her impeccable cleavage.
I fear Red Monolith has basically just relinquished his hold on Cusp because within an hour I am teetering on the edge of total unconsciousness, on my knees in the Tower’s palatial women’s toilets eating her pussy and trying not to fall over as she moans and the leather of my chest is slick with her juices and she’s groaning and I am trying not to topple over and up close, her greenish pubic hair looks luminous in the fluorescent lights. She hitches her breath and cums and bursts out laughing and then returns the favor and my mind is far away, I can’t get anywhere, thinking about Elisabeth alone in bed and wondering what it was exactly I agreed to when Twilight commenced upon his research.
For the first time in a long while I throw up and it feels like battery acid. Cusp wets my hair and strokes my brow and it feels so wrong and yet so high school that I can’t resist, just lying there like a used inflatable sex toy after all the semen has dried, an embarrassing reminder that might normally be rectified with a hunting knife to then get stuffed into the crawlspace under the house.
Doc Prendergast is as drunk as a skunk and somebody has called a VTOL craft me, Cusp, Mastodon, Stiletto, Darkstorm and Falconer pile into, along with Hermes and his creator, while Red Monolith and Paragon come to blows in the corner of the club without any powers to back them up as the undercarriage doors snicker shut and the automatic pilot lifts us up from the Silver Tower and we hurry across the dawn sky, the city all smoke-colored domes and dully-glinting high-rises, a gigantic airship blinking with lights on the horizon as another transatlantic cruise comes to an end at the docks in Newark.
The aircraft is piloted by an earlier version of the same brand of artificial intelligence as Hermes, Professor Prendergast explains. I look around, but I can’t see any more robots, and in tones bordering on the truculent the scientist explains the machine brain is inside the vehicle. Cusp is sitting in his lap and laughing like a drunk schoolgirl as his explanations maintain a stoic and didactic clip despite him being shitfaced, which I guess means the ship is his, and we cross the state as the sun comes up and touch down at a country mansion he says used to be a private school for gifted runaways until he bought it with the money he made from inventing the “show desktop” icon in Windows XP. I can’t be entirely certain he is joking about this.
We tumble out of the aircraft and onto the lawn, breath steaming, and Prendergast’s newly-awoken staff stagger around like broken robots to serve us coffee and croissants. Actually they are robots, eerie with their pink vinyl skins not perfectly maintained, their tiny sunken black eyes watching us in our tomfoolery.
Before we’re all completely sober, Prendergast takes us on a tour of the mansion’s basement, down to where he keeps all his toys. After he shows us the fourth or fifth ingenious high-tech device that targets parts of the brain to produce unnatural levels of animal passions – such as lust, Prendergast drily explains – most of us are snickering uncontrollably at the old pervert, and Darkstorm, completely shattered still, is making out with Stiletto, and Mastodon takes one of the ray guns and actually shoots them both with it. As the professor flips out. Darkstorm and Stiletto start ripping at each other’s clothes and basically going for it like a pair of horny wolves. Cusp is leading me away by the hand with a wry grin, so I am spared the sight of the other two heroes doggy-styling, and it is two in the afternoon before I wake up in one of the manor rooms wrapped in a soggy sheet with only a pair of green silk bikini briefs to remind me what exactly happened.
And my cell phone starts ringing.
Zephyr 2.6 “Twilight’s Secret Handshake”
I ARRIVE HOME to find my apartment is a war zone.
Tessa’s crying and Elisabeth’s face is a shocking mask of red and white, her cheeks flushing like only an Irishwoman’s can, dark hair a curly mop pulled back tight from her taut face.
My daughter’s tears go on and on and Beth exhales slowly, and into that lull, eyes me walking into the apartment with my things in the sports bag I have stashed at the gym around the corner for more years than I care to remember.
“Well, here he is at last,” Elisabeth says. “Say his name enough times and maybe he’ll appear.”
As she walks from the room to the enclosed kitchen, she says, “Maybe you can talk some reason into her,” far too dismissively for my liking.
I feel ill with guilt and nauseous with fatherly affection as Tessa goes into her room and swings the door incompletely shut. It’s my cue to follow and yet I hesitate, moving close enough to have an eye on the kitchen where Elisabeth shakily pours herself a glass of whiskey neat.
“How about one for me?” I ask.
“When you’ve earned it.”
“What the hell do you think I’ve been doing?” It’s hard not to match her growl.
“Saving the city was yesterday, according to the news. I have no fucking idea what you’ve been doing today. It better not have anything to do with this.”
From the kitchen, she hurls a magazine that falls open lazily, exposing itself before me with a page crammed with circle captions, a paparazzi snap of myself and Miss Black at Mechano’s last week. My hitching breath and accelerating heart rate still themselves.
“That’s just tabloid rubbish, babe. . . .”
“Just talk to Tess,” Beth sighs and downs her gla
ss with a grimace before switching on the TV and brushing past me, curling up resolutely on the couch.
On the flatscreen, an advertisement shows Vulcana lifting a car above her head and laughing as the wheels bounce away. The ads segue into the news, the naval blockade of South Africa, the Chinese AIDS epidemic, Finnish separatists bombing St Petersburg, strange obelisks found in the Australian outback, bodies missing from the city morgue, sightings of a so-called ‘moth-man’ around the plush new Pier 42 development, and a man with Siamese twin miniature poodles. . . .
So I turn back to the bedroom door.
My Enercom phone starts ringing in the gym bag and I ignore it with a mighty effort of will. Instead, I advance on Tessa’s door like a weary patrol of marines at Iwo Jima. Through the crack, I see her sitting up, composed as she can be, her thick legs bare in her slobbing-around-the-house shorts and oversized Atlantic U t-shirt. She stares at the monitor of her laptop with determined remoteness, nothing showing but the screensaver of stars flying by. Gently, I rap on the door with my knuckles and manage not to break anything or give the light fitting an electric shock.
“Come in, dad.”
I do so, moving across to the bed so that she’s in front of me, back turned, the desk lamp creating a nimbus around her unruly and seasonably lavish auburn hair.
“What’s going on?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” she drawls, one hundred per cent teen.
“Not to me,” I say. “I just got here.”
“Yeah. Mum’s been on about that too. We should leave her.”
I snort a laugh. “Where would we go?”
“Anywhere.”
“Mum pays the bills. . . .”
It occurs to me this line of comedy isn’t something to be pursued. Tessa harrumphs. It’s all quite serious to her.
“She can save herself a couple of thousand and give up trying to get me back into that fucking school. Astrid’s folks are enrolling her at Greenwood Alternative. I could go there too, dad?”
She turns and looks at me, eyes blurry with tears darkened by the mascara I didn’t know she wore. This is it, I think – the big push, the big hope, school with her little friend, girlfriend or whatever.
Beth would never stand for it.
“Honey, I know it says ‘alternative,’ but I think Greenwood costs about twice what the Academy does. . . .”
“Jesus, dad,” my pride and joy snaps. “Spoken like a true bum.”
“Thanks honey. You’re reminding me why we stopped at one. . . .”
“It’s not fair, dad –”
“Whoa,” I say, and actually hold up my hand.
We’ve had an agreement about that particular line of debate for about eight years and Tessa knows fully well arguing the fairness of things is like trying to convince someone the sky is green.
She drops her eyes and pitches forward.
“Well fuck, it isn’t fair, dad.”
“You’re probably right,” I say with a sigh.
Tessa looks askance and there’s a flash of amusement despite the tears, having me agree an unexpected surprise, and for some fluky reason, my break-through moment. Relating to her is one of the few things I’ve ever been able to pull off unassisted, it seems. How ironic for Beth and no wonder she resents it.
“What am I gonna do, dad?”
“Just give it time, babe,” I reply. “What do you want to do? Leave home at fifteen?”
“I’m fourteen.”
“I don’t imagine you doing it this year,” I retort.
Tess snickers.
“Is this for real?” I ask and make a complicated rotating finger motion, the universal sign language for exploratory teenage lesbianism.
“Well, I think so.” She frowns, a pretty child, still so much a baby with her full cheeks and long lashes. “Is it . . . would it be so terrible?”
“Not to me.”
“And mum?”
“It’s the. . . .” I’m suddenly unsure of what I’m even going to say, so I plough on regardless, concerned less about being right than saying the right thing.
“It’s not you, Tess, it’s the world. Your mum cares, I’m sorry to say.”
“And you don’t?” she asks.
“I’m the bum, right?”
Tessa watches me closely for a long second and finally nods.
“If you say so, dad.”
I later find a formal letter from the school regarding Tessa’s expulsion.
The unpaid and forward-dated fees are not negotiable, it somehow argues convincingly.
*
THERE DOESN’T SEEM much point sticking around with Elisabeth shooting freezing looks. A glance into the gym bag shows Zephyr’s phone has seven messages on it.
I slip through to the back room and fire up my PC, switching on the police scanner and quickly turning the volume down low. Proper soundproofing of my secret studio is one of those things we never really managed to get on the budget, and with my “cover” as a failed novelist and occasional baseball hack (I did get a piece in the New Yorker, once), the money’s probably not about to materialize any time soon.
Unless I sort Zephyr out.
To this end, I wade through a number of calls from prospective agents whose eyes have obviously lit up at the prospect of representing Atlantic City’s favorite son. That’s how I try to think of myself, anyway, especially on low days. (Yeah, you wouldn’t think it helps, but it does). With one hand on the computer keyboard I type names and numbers into a wordpad and then Google the findings, sifting through a few less fortunate contenders until I find a publicist named Hallory O’Hagan. She already represents a string of B-grade actors and minor celebrities including novelist Bret Easton Ellis and film-maker Alan Moore. Her webpage shows a cute button-nose redhead in a crème-colored business suit. This is not a good basis for a business decision, but she’s hot.
I give Miss O’Hagan a call and arrange to meet at her offices in the morning, discretion being the better part of trying to conduct business in a public place. Although I note some of the other numbers down, truth is I hope to avoid any long and drawn-out process. This isn’t new behavior on my account by any stretch. I’m already simultaneously thinking about lunch (it’s almost 4.30pm) and my hours of missing sleep. The scanner informs me of a bank heist on the river, but I’m no sooner reaching reluctantly for my smelly leathers than I hear a radio code signifying a masked response and an over-excited identification of Hermes moments later suggests the officer must be new to Atlantic City.
I listen with professional curiosity as the codes relay the story as effectively and efficiently as any comic strip, with three of the robbers foiled on the spot while their leader, a costumed villain eventually identified as Ripper, battles it out against Hermes on the roof of the bank building.
I’m as astounded as ever that they even bother. It’s a hard way to get rich. There are venture capitalists making twenty million in a morning, mum and dad investors losing life savings while trade corporations grow. God, think of the fossil fuel corporations, still pushing the diesel car as the most effective form of travel in a world where freaks of science like Chamber have perfected N-dimensional transport.
Hermes’ response sounds as brutal as it is effective. The call goes out for paramedics and I figure that’s one supervillain who’s not going to be troubling the city for a while.
I discover yet more missed calls while I’m doodling with the cell phone, and finally someone picks up at the end of the first call and informs me I missed my appointment with prisoner S. Zahn at White Nine. Sarcastic comments about being busy saving the city from a biblical plague of locusts fall on deaf ears and I reschedule with a bored-sounding prison clerk for the following afternoon.
I can hardly wait.
*
BY EVENING, THE city is quiet. In the aftermath of Creeping Death’s unsuccessful foray into super-crime, you can’t buy a bug bomb in the local supermarket and people seem more concerned with staying home to lick their
wounds than getting back into the megalopolis to party. The final count was six direct deaths from the insect plague and three more as a result of faults in air-conditioning and electrical cables after the incident. Although I assumed our perpetrator was sucked into Twilight’s secret handshake, it turns out very fine tissue particles recovered from the scene suggest our play pal was vaporized on entry. It’s a shame, because otherwise I had to hand it to Twilight, apart from the apparent homicide, it was a neat solution.
Bad luck the FBI don’t think so. I have unreturned calls from Agent Synergy and a hankering for egg rolls from Li’s in Chinatown.
In-between returning some videos in my secret identity and dinner en solo, I slip back into costume in an alleyway off the Chinatown High Street and alight at the base of the illuminated crane on Masters Tower to view the European-style reconstructed Old Town bordering where the Miskatonic pours into the sea.
Twilight is one of the few caller IDs programmed into the phone. I flick the set open at his call and gaze out at the lights of tankers plying the ocean as well as the latest in-bound zeppelin for Newark.
“Twilight. I just missed the sunset. What’s up?”
“Calling you,” he replies. “Think about my offer?”
“I have,” I say. “Though I haven’t quite finished yet. I’m a little hazy on what I agreed to.”
“Agreed to?”
There comes the atypical Twilight laugh.
“Hmm, little man,” he says, the endearment more a mannerism than the weird malapropism it seems, “I don’t remember you agreeing to anything, yet. You were to consider it.”
“‘It’?”
“Um . . . the ultimate work-life balance,” Twilight replies.
“And this is achieved . . . how?”
“It’s a kind of magic,” Twilight replies and laughs.
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