“I’m surprised you didn’t stay hiding in there,” she greets me.
“Why would I do that?”
I have a subtle grin, encouraging relaxation she has the perfect right to ignore.
“I’m not sure it’s your night, Joe.”
“It’s been a hell of a night. I know that much,” I say.
“For real,” Beth says, reviving a popular aphorism from our old high school days, though I think she does so without any self-awareness, no joke-within-a-joke, no attempt to break down barriers. She looks worried, and I eventually realize, scared.
“Are you . . . OK?”
Beth looks at me like maybe it seems an unusual thing to ask, and it strikes me that way as well, though that feeling just underscores my own sense of failure as a husband that it should come to pass that the simple act of asking after my wife’s welfare seems so strange. Nonetheless, the awkwardness lends a genuine concern that not even Beth can shrug off.
“Not really, Joe. Not really.”
“It all comes as quite a shock,” I say. “For me, I mean. And I’m the one with powers. I can’t imagine how you’re feeling.”
Elisabeth starts to reply, but she halts, lips in a grimace as she shakes her head of unpleasant thoughts like a cheap vodka after-taste.
“What?”
“No,” she says. “It’s too soon.”
“Too soon for what?”
“Joseph, please. Just this once.” She flicks her gaze to me and finishes her cigarette. “Just this once let it go, please. I’m tired. You’re right that this has all been too much.”
“Going home?”
“Yes.”
“Taking Tessa with you?”
Beth sighs and surrenders to her own lack of care, dropping the cigarette butt and grinding it into the designer gravel an admission of so much about her place in the world, our family, her own hopelessness. Perhaps that sounds melodramatic, but consider yourself in the shoes of a woman grappling with a lousy husband, oddball in-laws, a gay daughter who also turns out to be a freak likely to follow her father into a closeted public lifestyle that could bring ruin on the family at any moment if not murder at the hands of some costumed nut-job. Add a hellish career of her own. Stir gently. No wonder she’s freaked out.
“I take it you won’t be joining us?”
“Well. . . .”
“Christ, Joe. It’s going to be hard enough to get Tessa in the car as it is.”
“Maybe in future she can fly. . . ?”
“Joseph, don’t tell me you endorse this.”
“Endorse . . . this?”
“Windsong.”
She says the name like her mouth has suddenly become a cat’s ass, required to do something unpleasant and vaguely shameful.
“Hmmm yeah, she said that to me too.”
I ponder for a moment. Beth watches me at work, a look only somewhat removed from the wonder that eighteenth century people had while watching the first clockwork automaton. Once the gears have moved sufficiently, I join the dots and say as much. Elisabeth only nods gravely.
“I don’t want her following me into this lunacy,” I say. “Not in this business. There’s plenty of . . . masks in public life, people with abilities, who aren’t punching bags like I am. Hey, if I could sing, this whole thing would’ve turned down another road, right?”
I grin and gesture as if to trigger what few memories we share of the time I was approached to do a pop album. One of the many times I should be grateful my wife talked me back from the edge. She was the only one who’d heard me in the shower, after all.
“I somehow don’t think Tessa wants to be the next Queen Latifah,” Beth replies.
“She could do worse.”
“Can she sing?”
I blink. “Have you ever heard our daughter sing? Like, in her whole life?”
At some point I failed to notice Beth is crying.
“She used to sing in her stroller,” she says mournfully. “Remember? I would go to the park or to get milk . . . Old women would smile at me and say, ‘You must be doing something right. Listen to her sing’.”
Beth sighs like a gunshot victim, leaning back and accepting death.
“She was like a little bird. So happy.”
She caves in, face in the mask of her hands, but when I go to give my husbandly comfort, she pushes me back double-handed, face, despite the weak light, filled with red rage like some Kabuki performer after a few tokes of crack. Until I remind myself I can dodge small arms fire, I’m genuinely afraid. After the surprise of the realization has cooled, I’m still upset, should perhaps remain afraid, wondering what it means when a woman at her weakest won’t let me near her.
Tomorrow I will find out.
*
THERE’S ONE PIECE of unfinished business I have to deal with before I can leave. After watching the red tail lights recede, my red-eyed Beth chauffeuring a tearful Tessa back across the borough, I head back into the house.
“So how about that dinner?” I grin, rubbing my hands together.
“Joseph, take off that mask while you’re inside the house,” George tells me.
“Jesus, mum,” I remark. “Do you think that’s wise?”
“You never did get used to George’s sense of humor,” Max warns me, walking in with the demeanor of a woman who has just throttled a pet to death in the next room.
An aura of displeasure mars her smooth round dykey face and I realize she’s removed her eyeglasses. She probably isn’t looking forward to what’s coming next. She’s not the only one.
I sigh and reflect, mostly to myself, “Christ, and you wonder why I don’t visit more often.”
“It’s not every day you learn your daughter has super-powers,” Maxine says.
“I’ve known about the gay thing for a while,” I lie, shrugging. “It’s no big deal by me.”
“I should hope not,” Max says.
I should’ve remembered there’s no brownie points there. Extreme tolerance was de rigueur in our house growing up. People who discriminated against gays or even muties were cunts who should be shot or put into camps, as far as I recall.
George is way too busy making a round of coffees. She looks decidedly uncomfortable and I don’t think it’s the ridiculous Germaine Greer effect of her oversized sweater and old farmer’s wife hairstyle. Max sits at the round kitchen table like a self-conscious homily to the bygone era of happy families. It never occurred to me till now to wonder if in all her badass cultural critiques she ever turned that high-powered torch on her own life and wondered what drive compels her to valorize the look – at least the look – of a time in our history that must have suppressed so much individual creativity, not to mention all the unhappy Jews, queers and niggers. Funny, ironic even, to end up fetishizing the very epoch that repressed you. It was when the first mutants started appearing, lynched side-by-side with the black folks down south.
“So, mom,” I shrug, chortle, grin, wince and tightly sigh. “How about your super-powers, huh?”
There’s silence, apart from the tinkling of the teaspoon.
“You were Catchfire, huh?” I continue. “What happened there? If I know my history, you just kinda disappeared all of a sudden one day, right?”
George turns around. She has the good manners to have a tear in her eye at least, not that she looks any more likely to start talking. Instead, she crosses the room and places her wife’s coffee mug in front of her, the one with Garfield holding a copy of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. Then she stands behind her man, so to speak, hands on the shoulders of Max’s fashionably postmodern garment, fingers sinking in to the pads.
Silence.
“I think you guys were going to tell me something about my dad?”
I fire off the prompt with all the mendacious swagger of the teenager I once was, only to find in the twenty-odd years since I was in short pants I’ve developed at least the vestiges of mild empathy for my two mothers. The slow-motion shattering of George’s potter
y visage is like a knife to my chest. Maxine reaches around and clasps her hand atop her lover’s. I’m surprised when it is she who speaks.
“It wasn’t an easy series of choices, Joseph. It’s late now. I think we should set a time to discuss this in greater detail.”
“But not now,” I say in monotone.
“No,” Max replies. “You keep a secret for half your life, you should take pause before you let it all out.”
“At least you admit your . . . guilt,” I say, croaking at the end because I can’t find a better word before my tongue demands the sentence’s end.
“We’ve nothing to be guilty about, Joseph,” Max says. “If your father knew you existed, he wouldn’t stop until you were dead.”
My eyes crinkle at this announcement, which seems completely nonsensical until I slowly come to understand that neither of them is joking.
“You’re kidding me,” I softly laugh. “Why? Who is he?”
Max looks up at George and she slowly nods, eyes closing like she’s approving an execution. My own eyes remain locked on Max, the delegated truth-breaker in this kitchen sink drama.
“J-John Lennon,” she says, looking swiftly away.
“John Lennon,” George says quietly. “The Doomsday Man.”
Zephyr 2.14 (Coda)
“YOU KNEW THE Beatles?”
It’s a sucky thing to say, but hell, this is the Beatles we’re talking about – the first team of supers who weren’t just a government propaganda exercise or a way to sell bonds for the war effort. It didn’t matter they were Brits. Or Beatniks. Before mutants started appearing in the 60s or really the 70s, and giving masks a bad name, the Beatles were the guys many of us grew up idolizing whether we were secret parahumans or just ordinary schmucks. John, George, Ringo and Paul – they were too badass to have the sorts of costume names now so synonymous with modern day heroes and their lucrative brand endorsements. Sure, sometimes we knew them as Preacher, Saint George, Wolfman and the Visionary, but they were interchangeable, more like hats they could take on and off, like the made-up names of the people Paul and John used to talk about in their regular Global Address. Records of those counter-cultural monologues used to sell like wildfire, like pop albums even, and characters like Eleanor Rigby and Sergeant Pepper came to serve as stand-ins for a whole generation tackling social and political issues their parents never had even the time and luxury to contemplate. It was a changing world. The transformations my mother went through were proof of that.
And many would say the Beatles were never the same after they went to India, which was followed closely by the death of the Wolfman. It was only later John became known as the Doomsday Man. The biggest change of all. Sure, it’s a suck-ass name, but it was the 80s, and a good while after my mother Catchfire had left the crime-fighting scene.
“Are you telling me . . . John Lennon is my dad?”
Their hard, nervous faces soften at the one moment of amazement and wonder to be gained from this otherwise bleak story. I understand there’s more to be told and perhaps I am not likely to hear the rest of it any time soon, but for fuck’s sake, John Lennon is my father?
“He’s . . . perhaps not everything you’d expect.”
“Well sure, he went to jail for like, fucking genocide or something,” I remark. “But isn’t he dead?”
“No,” George says and sounds sad to be saying it.
“He did ten years, and . . . well, we never really understood how, the authorities declared he’d reformed and they let him go in 1994,” Max relates. “We’ve been keeping under the radar ever since, though how you do that from one of the world’s most powerful minds, as I’m sure you can imagine, Joseph, that’s not an easy task.”
“No,” I say, all thoughtful-like, because suddenly here we are, my moms and me almost talking shop. And I have to reflect on all my own adventures in the public eye, my famous battles against Crescendo and Think-Tank and the Ill-Centurion and even Mentor, tucked away in the catacombs of Manhattan, and of course they must have known about each and every one.
Bloody hell.
“And you think he would try to kill me?” I ask sincerely. “Why?”
The graven looks on these two faces tells me they’re silently hoping I’ll let the matter drop for this evening, giving them the chance to regroup and get their story straight before they let me in on the rest of the deal. I can already clue together that the end of Catchfire’s cat-suited career coincided with the time the Beatles came back from India and the failed Summer Rebellion of 1972, Ringo’s death at the hands of the original Protector and the official disbanding of the team. It’s not a big part of history I ever paid much attention to, except I know when John went off on his Messiah trip and grew his hair and beard long, he dropped out of sight somewhere, back in India, the south of France? I have no idea.
Clearly, George and Maxine not only think he’s still alive, they know something – and it’s tied in to the intense secrecy around George’s own powers, and serious enough they were willing to lie to me my whole life and let me prance around old New York dressed like some leather fruitcake none the wiser.
So I tell it like it is.
“Can’t say I’m very happy about this. I’ll leave you two to get your story together and maybe you can call me when you’ve got a version of the truth you’re actually willing to share with me.”
Just to add hubris to insult, I throw one of my Zephyr cards on the table complete with the Enercom phone number.
“What about Tessa and Beth. . . ?” Maxine begins, standing up from the table fast enough to make the antique chair squeal.
“What about them?” I snap. “They’ll be fine.”
“Won’t you tell us if there are any more . . . problems, between Tess and her mother?” George asks.
“Hey, you get to be ringside to my life when you come clean about yours.”
It’s too hard to resist another patented badass scowl, and electricity pours down my arms to my hand as I snap about, probably more Zoolander than Zephyr as I stalk out the door.
Outside, there has been a gentle rain, perhaps Tessa’s weather irruption clearing out. Before either of the old women can chase me through the door, if they are even gonna, I do the crouch thing and rocket skywards, accelerating to a fair height and hitting Mach far above the safe level for the skadillions of houses below. Like a new-fangled missile, I veer abruptly for sweet, non-existent Hoboken and then change tack again, passing over the restored heritage precinct of Newport only a handful of minutes later.
I bounce erratically through mild turbulence, my jaw set, a harder, less ignorant man than I was before, but no less fallible. Human, all too human, as the coffee mug says.
Zephyr 3.1 “A Sense Of The Cosmic Inevitable”
I BUZZ AN incoming airship as I flit like a human spark across the short stretch of the Atlantic between the New Hampshire coast and Twilight’s private island. The sea is remarkably calm, emphatically alien in its darkness, the hidden depths, things that don’t like us lurking there and waiting for their next meal. The whole thing gives me the shivers. Sixty-eight million fricking light globes or whatever and the ocean still chills me to the core. I fancy I must’ve been a whaler in a past life, coming to a messy end bloated and wrapped in kelp and washed ashore somewhere in Scandinavia just like any other piece of driftwood or Atlantic detritus.
At least someone is awake on Fantasy Island, if not the big guy himself. A spotlight plays across my path and eventually I get the drift it is guiding me to the helipad, as if that were necessary, a big black sexy-looking motherfucker parked like a slumbering Transformer on the flight deck. Yeah, I know they probably don’t call them that, but hell, you know I mean where the choppers go sleepy bye-byes.
Is Twilight going to be mad at me? And exactly what would that entail? With him, it’s always been a Devil-may-care, Lost Boys kind of one-upmanship urging me to the edge. Many a time I’ve lead the race, but it’s easy to have that sort of devilish attitude
when you’re up to your armpits in black-as-black sorcery. I’m just a guy from Queens who can throw cars and lightning bolts. For all I know, the thunderbolt that brought me down at the windfarm was also responsible for the semi-permanent hard-on that has made normalcy so hard this last decade. Twilight is a whole other deal.
We’re at the northern end of Atlantic City here. The woodlands of Maine beckon yonder. I know Twilight mentioned he owned property up there once. Probably a whole town for all I know. The recycled city that engulfs Boston, DC and Philadelphia in its panoptic wake fritters itself away at the edges, at least up here, going from George Jetson territory one moment to shanty towns and drive-by burger joints amid post-industrial and semi-rural towns peopled like Middle Eastern or should that be Middle Ages warzones, the denizens huddling inside from the lights and the loud noises.
Twilight certainly has the right idea, provided you’ve got a cool half-billion to back it up. And hey, if your daddy is the head of the most powerful ethnic crime syndicate in America, so what, even if he is dead? To his credit, it was Twilight himself who tried to splash cold water on any fancy feelings I might be harboring, reminding me he’s the anti-hero. What does it mean, for someone to position themselves like that, apart from they’ve probably read more post-grad papers on comic books than the comics themselves?
I plop to the ground beside the glistening dew-covered ordnance and walk smoothly into the darkness between the helipad and the main house. Twilight’s sanctum, no longer divided by a hellish discus of necrotic energy, is tastefully up-lit by halogens concealed in the grass throwing a green tone across the stone exterior. But it is the double doors to the side of the mansion that open, light within twinkling with promises of esoteric conversation and export-grade brandy. A solitary besuited guard stands at the door, seemingly unarmed, however falsely, and another with an Uzi stands inside. By the time I’m thirty feet away they’ve both disappeared.
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