“Oh, there’s women too. I never asked about that. . . .”
“And they are, exactly. . . ?”
“A fifteen-hundred-year-old secret society dedicated to keeping the doors closed between our world and the next,” Seeker says in a relaxed voice that does nothing to detract from her measured and careful pronunciation.
“Okay. So they hunt monsters and stuff who sneak through?”
“In the early days, that’s how it began,” she says. “It got complicated once they perfected their own technology on a parallel Earth.”
“And these are the guys who are offering to sponsor the New Sentinels a base?” I ask slowly.
“Well, we’ll need one.”
“I thought Devil Betty. . . ?”
“I don’t know, Joseph. As I said to you before, I’m not that comfortable with the, uh, demonic overtones of that name.”
“So a kid makes a bad wish on a shooting star after listening to too many Marilyn Manson albums.” I shrug. “To paraphrase something I heard recently, just because she used to worship the Devil doesn’t necessarily make her a bad person.”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Seeker replies.
“Okay.”
I stare out the window with the patented gaze of one of those small pampered lap dogs rich women like to take with them on trips across town. Through the glass of the taxi window the downtown area flicks past at a haphazard pace. Finally we get stalled in traffic again down near the harbor and for some reason I start chuckling about a joke in an email I got from Nautilus a couple of days back.
“What’s so funny?” Seeker asks.
“It’s nothing.”
“Hmmm. By the way,” she says, “I meant to ask you, have you heard from Darkstorm in the past few days? I can’t get him to answer his cell.”
“Hmmm no,” I reply. “Years ago he used to have this message drop at a laundry in Chi-town. That place secretly run by goblins or elves or whatever the hell it was. You want to stop by there?”
“No,” Seeker replies.
She stares out the window just in time to catch a homeless man introducing two tourists to his dancing chicken act. Loren’s pretty eyes flinch at the sight, making me wonder just how innocent the girl can be, given some of the things we’ve seen in this life.
“I’m sure he’ll turn up in the end,” she says, distracted.
“How’s Vulcana doing, by the way?”
The brightness re-enters Seeker’s eyes.
“Better every day. This is one of the benefits of the Wallachian Fortress I want to talk about with you, Joseph. The Brotherhood’s clerics will have her fighting fit in no time at all.”
“I wonder how Connie feels about that?”
“Why in Heaven would you say that?” Seeker frowns. “Her arm was torn off. I’m sure she’s thrilled to get back to how she was.”
I nod, inner turmoil defused as the frantically eavesdropping cabbie drives us to the rendezvous with the disappearing castle.
It only takes Loren a moment to mindwipe the driver once we’ve parked, and since I’m a little short of change, I offer to pay and catch her up, leaving the disoriented cabbie parked in a tow zone as I scamper to eventually follow the hot brunette in the high-heeled boots disappearing into thin air outside the boarded up walls of the construction site.
Zephyr 4.5 “A Different Kind Of Normal”
I AM DOWNTOWN. The air is chill and the traffic thrums and stalls around me like angry geese, horns going off like in a cavalcade. My arms are full of things a man in my financial situation has no right to afford, but I have a paycheck due from the management company for a bunch of voice-overs I did the previous week and they even paid me to sign a pile of forms I didn’t exactly read. I’m excited but nervous because I feel the change in the air and it’s not just the first flakes of winter snow.
I ignore the incipient fender benders around me and step over a homeless guy lying in front of the department store asleep with his cock out and the biggest take-away mocha chill latte I have ever seen in my life spilled across the pavement beside him, a rich woman’s small dog lapping unseen at the edge of the puddle with its eyes going wide as it steps into a little of the human sensorium. The black guys at the entrance of the shop eye me like a rival gangsta, which I ignore because, you know, I’m cool with that shit, and I nod on the sly and make up some kind of fucking hand signal for a laugh that makes one wince and the other screw up his face in bewilderment. Oh yeah, and I’ve dropped about fifteen of these tiny little cute pills I found down the back of the couch, gagging on the lint, the pink hearts familiar to me and not actually candy as you might expect. They put a fire in my belly and an iron rod I have to practically strap to the side of my leg as I amble into the big lit-up store, ignoring the more Christmassy decorations with my arms already half-filled with shit I shouldn’t be buying.
I’m moving house soon. That explains the back-of-the-sofa foraging and also why I am not at home at 6pm without a good excuse, no one to cook my dinner or give me the hairy eyeball when I turn up at nine smelling like wood smoke or brine or ectoplasm or Asian pussy with no real explanation to offer to a family who apparently all knew about the ridiculous one-man play my life had become. It just lacked a title. Perhaps, Zephyr the Amazing Doofus. I could think of a dozen things more harsh if it wasn’t for my happy pills and I’ll be frank with you that it’s a nice surprise to get a little holiday from the black mood following me of late.
I’ve only just recovered from finding myself standing somewhere in the middle of the Eighth Century pushing corpses into a swamp with just a handful of unspeaking, black-cowled, so-called priests as my accomplices. As Seeker glibly explained – troublingly so, for someone so spiritual – by the time Ash and the guy from the Jackass crew’s bodies turn up, they’ll have been decayed for centuries and unidentifiable. I thought I read or watched something once about peat bogs actually preserving people better, but I am not going to get into a slanging match with a bunch of Wallachians who don’t actually speak anyway, except among themselves, and even then in low whispers.
I buy the essentials: clean underwear, rewritable DVDs, disposable razors, cue tips, a new hairbrush, toothbrush, shoe brush, boot polish and five cans of leather refresher that makes the emo chick behind the counter raise her heavily-pierced eyebrow, an effort by itself, and she laughs gently and makes some joke about me having a fetish and because I’m a little high I just nod and leer and say, “Yes, Veronica, and that is not all I can do,” and successfully creep her out. If I had my mask on she would so be mine. I dig the purple highlights in her hair, the chalky face, the pubescent cleavage straining at the secretarial white button-up blouse the shop makes her wear. I think of Cusp and my daughter Tessa simultaneously and it’s not the most comfortable sensation I’ve had all week.
In front of a display of the latest holo-projection TVs, my Zephyr phone starts blurping and I look over my shoulder, knowing already I am going to risk it despite the mild shopping turbulence around me. I pile my things onto the carpeted step beneath one of the TVs showing news footage of the Pope setting down in Newark, and whoever it is on the other end of the phone, I cannot hear a fucking word they are saying. I cut the line and realize I have five text messages, three of them from Seeker about “team business,” one from the guy who still manages my web forum, and one from Streethawk, of all people, asking if the rumors are true that we’re putting together a new squad. Sorry Bruce, no homos allowed, is what I think to myself, and then catch myself on the television suddenly, brows crinkled as I ponder how exactly I turned out to be such a homophobic beeotch given my upbringing – and it’s disorienting trying to work out why I can see myself on the holoscreen until I realize a salesman is demonstrating a handicam to a bunch of East China tourists who look like they’ve never seen an electric light, let alone a HD camera.
The phone rings again. I put my finger in my other ear. It’s the guy from the web forum again, I can’t remember his name for the
moment as he’s telling me something about an irate fan who keeps demanding he pass on a message about the end of the world. I give a good laugh – it’s not easy being Zephyr on the phone when I’m not in costume and I’m surrounded by other people – and I tell my little helper not to worry about it and I have a pretty good idea who it is. This is a lie, of course, but I am not about to go sweating the psychiatric foibles of every loser who finds himself at contactzephyr.com.nu(.)
On the regular televisions I see shaky footage of a guy in a wrestling suit straining like someone with a blocked ass and then he swells and blisters and grows to about the size of a small elephant and goes all red and angry-looking and the words COALFACE appears as the surface of his body blackens and cracks open like the mantle of a volcano and I have to admit to myself, that’s one nasty-looking motherfucker, and that’s why I am glad it appears to be just a TV show. I pick up my purchases and decide to go buzz the perfume section and see about buying an early birthday present for Tessa, marveling at my uncurtailed freedom and wondering where exactly it is that I’m going to sleep once Beth settles on the date for her taking back the apartment.
*
THE PHONE IS ringing while I take a dump and it’s not just my sullen alpha waves that mean I don’t move a muscle, letting it drone on and on and on, my thoughts a thousand miles away and the sky outside filling up with black ink.
Eventually the phone is quiet. I shower, do my “ablutions,” which is a term I guess writers of Stoker’s era used to avoid describing the messy business I clean off my knuckles with tissue paper the consistency of gauze wrap as I sigh, filled with discontentedness, and then stand at the wide bank of apartment windows gazing across the cityscape as night descends like an inexpertly hung stage curtain, staggering down unevenly but eventually consuming the whole thing in darkness until the audience, uncomfortable in their seats, shift and wonder what purpose this development, how does the staging match the set design in bringing forward the central themes of the piece, assuming an author somewhere, intentionality, a coherent structure, the inevitability of climax and resolution, only to find the circus has moved on and run off with the price of their admission.
My life, for the moment, lacks all of these details. When I go to dress, half-a-quart of milk gurgling in my stomach and a vague craving for Swedish meatballs unconquered, I realize my costume smells like a homeless man’s trolley. The comparative luxury of my situation affords me a clean outfit and the almost Japanese ritual of the process of costuming myself in leather and turning the old suit inside out and hanging it to air in the wallspace obscures the central fact I now have few reasons to dress like an ordinary person, that without those silently knowing figures so recently extracted from my life I am one hundred per cent superhero on call without much else to show for my existence.
While I might long for a different kind of normal, the feeling of familiarity and safety brought by my leather encasement is a comfort I might find hard to describe if I had to, if there was anyone else with which to share my thoughts except you, my phantasmal darling. Briefly I think of Cusp, Seeker, Vulcana, Devil Betty, handicam footage of my daughter and Shade turning pirouettes at Mach over the Silver Tower. While I admit I’m feeling sorry for myself, and it might be the comedown from self-medication making it such a drag, the tomb of the apartment and the desecration of my private life revealed by the bare refrigerator, strewn magazines and empty pizza boxes underlines the reality beneath my funk. I am no has-been when I am Zephyr, yet even slumping on the sofa and staring at the disconnected television, I am already moving imperceptibly back toward being that person who, in a parallel life, declined to climb the maddening tower and went on to live a plain, inglorious and altogether unremarkable life. Perhaps I would’ve been happier. Perhaps I could’ve kept Beth, though it’s questionable I could’ve wooed her in the first place without my lightning trick and incredible strength to seduce the girl she so quickly ceased to be upon our graduation. More likely I would’ve met some girl behind the desk of a pharmacy, a library, a video store, raised a brood of weird-looking children and continued on through ignominy to the anonymity of death.
Oh God.
In the bathroom, I contemplate my face in the mirror, my mask gone. Whatever fate awaited me – presuming the intersection of my life with that lightning bolt was anything other than kismet – the very fact of my existence is underwritten by my paternity. Electrical storm or no, whatever else, they tell me I am John Lennon’s son. The Preacher Man. Yet we look nothing alike. Or, almost nothing alike, unless there’s something I’m missing.
There is an iconic image of Lennon from the Summer Rebellion. I move through the apartment to my computer in the wallspace, many of my things in boxes in preparation for the move. Excel spreadsheets from Sal Doro’s disc about the Azzurro Corporation is open from my half-hearted review of the web of complex company structures and asset holdings that one of Sal’s journo colleagues inexplicably had to hand. It is quickly minimized as I pull up Firefox and perform an image search to get the picture I’m after. It’s just a few seconds between this and that, and then my alleged father’s face stares out at me, the Preacher Man bearded and cross-legged in a white linen robe with heavy beads around his neck, floating in the air over the writhing hordes of protesters and London bobbies with Perspex shields and grimaces marring their mustachioed faces. He has one hand raised above him and the word “stop” nascent on his lips. Distracted that moment by a cameraman, perhaps an inherited trait after all, he turns his face sixty degrees towards the viewer and unintentional immortality. Put that in your cosmic peace pipe and smoke it, grandpa.
I’m eating at my parents’ place tomorrow night. All will be revealed, I suppose.
I sigh and wish I had a cigarette and my eyes drift down the initial table of thumbnails from the internet search and I find myself looking at quite a different, but nonetheless familiar face.
My half-brother, Julian.
Zephyr 4.6 “A Tarantino Moment”
MY REVERIE EVAPORATES at the chirrup of the Zephyr phone. I snatch it quickly from my belt, but otherwise remain defeated in my rickety office chair.
“What is it?”
“Is that Zephyr? It’s Hallory O’Hagan from MMI.”
“Oh, Hallory, Christ, hello. Sorry. I was expecting someone else,” I lie.
“That’s cool. Where are you now?” she asks in her ever-effervescent voice.
“I’m, uh, actually outside some bad guys’ lair right as we speak.”
I grin, pained, the expression unpleasant.
“Talk about a Tarantino moment.”
Hallory titters.
“I guess it seems like a silly time to want to discuss figurines with you.”
“Hey, I get fanboys wanting to talk about my figurine all the time.”
“Well, it’s definitely time we revamped your line. It’s been, what, ten years?”
“Sure.” I shrug. “Those plastic fuckers last forever.”
“Okay,” Hallory replies with enough trepidation that even I can discern it. “Did you manage to talk about the line of dolls with the other Sentinels?”
“New Sentinels,” I correct her.
I’m pretty sure I blew the rights to the old team name in a poker game, though it is equally possible it was Mastodon who walked out the winner, taking with him the keys to Omeganaut’s Omegamobile (which he later crashed and sank in the bottom of the bay) and the rights to Aquanaut’s first-born child. Boy was that a night.
“Look,” I tell the hot redhead on the other end of the phone. “It’s still a little premature to discuss this. We haven’t actually finalized the team.”
“Really? I thought we were booking media for the launch next Friday?”
“Well, yeah. . . .”
“I might have some interesting feedback for you, then,” Miss O’Hagan continues unperturbed. “Focus groups have thrown up a few names you might want to consider.”
“For my . . . team?”
“Well, for the action figures, but yeah I guess they need to be on the team too so we can license them, right?”
“Okay,” I shrug, uncomfortable yet intrigued. “Who?”
“Shade, for starters.”
“Shade’s, like, British. From London.”
“We’re getting some very good numbers for her at the moment, and besides, you’ll need some diversity, right?”
“So they tell me.”
“What about Paragon and Jocelyn?”
“Jesus,” I hiss. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” Hallory asks. “Have you even heard the figures they’re talking for wedding pictures?”
“Let’s keep going down the list.”
“Cusp? I don’t even know who that is.”
“I’m working on it. Next?”
“Okay. Red Monolith.”
“He’s, uh . . . he’s dead.”
“Okay, well that’s not happening then. Do you think we could acquire a license from his estate? Sort of a, ‘friend of the New Sentinels’ angle?”
“Jesus, lady, I don’t know,” I stagger a sigh. “I’m beginning to think you could get a license to kill if one really existed.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she says and I can practically hear her purr down the phone. She is so mine, even though it wasn’t meant as a compliment.
“Do you actually have any suggestions I can use?” I ask.
“Okay. Well how about Nocturne? If you can’t go with Shade, Nocturne’s another good colored option.”
“I don’t think we call them ‘colored’ any more,” I remark.
“I’ve got another idea, not sure what you’ll think about it.”
I scratch at my mask and realize I am still not wearing one.
“Go on.”
“The groups were indicating boys from eight all the way through to thirty-five were pretty keen on a modular, kind of transforming robot sort of guy,” Hallory says and barely drops pace as she continues with the spiel. “I’ve had production mock up a few costumes and the copy guys have suggested names: Contraption Man? Mr Roboto? Rocketman?”
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