“Yeah,” Tessa says. “Is that curry?”
“It’s an Indian recipe,” Max says stiffly. “That shop on Breaker and Vine, do you know it?”
No, we don’t know the Indian deli on Breaker and Vine, but we nod our heads like automata and focus so hard on the table it’s like we’re afraid it’s going to sprout wings and fly in to attack us. George places the roast on a platter in the middle and turns, ceremonial-like, and passes me the knife.
“Your mom said we never did include enough male-reinforcement rituals for you growing up, Joseph,” she says slowly. “How about you be a good lad and carve?”
I take the heavy knife and consider pitching it into my neck. Instead, I furnish the anticipated grin, an olive branch, as the diners slowly take their seats and we take yet more steps toward the moment I have been heading towards my whole life.
Zephyr 4.9 “Cover The Mirrors”
“YOUR FATHER WAS the one who thought differently to the others. The idea man, he was,” Georgia says eventually.
The dissertation starts without preamble or request. Perhaps it was me asking for the mint sauce. I don’t know, but she has a faraway look in her eyes I don’t want to disturb, like it requires some sort of channeling for this story to be told and well, perhaps in a way that’s true.
“He came to New York for a break from London. Things were too intense there. The Wolfman had died. Protector killed him, you’d know all about that. It’s high school history – well, not high school history, but for feck’s sake perhaps it should be.
“You’d think a man of John’s caliber would come to New York and be engaged in non-stop, you know, superhuman battles.”
She sighs and rolls her eyes and gives a fey laugh.
“Sorry love, it’s just at my age the whole thing comes to sound a little childish.”
“No offence. Go on,” I say, mesmerized.
“Well anyway, he didn’t. He locked himself in a hotel room with this strange Japanese woman he’d met at a party in Soho and he was already way into the yoga and tantric magic and meditation and, you know, weird stuff with your breathing and all that. He believed it helped him reach a higher plane and be even more powerful. That part must be true, when you consider all the surviving Beatles came back from India stronger than they’d been before. Just look at George these days, just appearing at random all over England whenever he wants to. He was just a garden variety telekinetic, you know, back in the day. It took him a week’s energy to transport them, the whole team, anywhere.
“John locked himself in that room with that mad bitch and her crazy ideas, stuff that would’ve made Hitler turn in his grave only she was Japanese, so it didn’t seem like racism to talk about eugenics and human evolution like ordinary human beings were cattle. That combined with the way his studies were letting his powers grow – he had men bring in a grand piano and he taught himself how to play in a month, never wearing anything more than a bed-sheet –”
“I remember the footage,” I say.
“Well it all seemed so innocent then. ‘Hair peace’ for cryin’ out loud.”
“What happened?” I ask, the others at the table silent, like statues. “How did you meet?”
“There was a party,” she says and smiles, eyes lowered, and Max puts a hand over hers to show her it’s alright, I guess, that she knobbed a bloke. “He was gorgeous and famous and something about his aura then, so powerful. I wasn’t the only one interested, but I was the only one he spoke to. The Japanese witch had gone. Her name was Ono, which sounds about right. She had powers too, just disappeared into the shadows he said, though of course that was a lie. She was probably with us the whole time, encouraging him, urging him on.”
“That seems pretty heavy. She died, didn’t she?”
“So they say,” Georgia replies and sniffs like it’s obviously no big loss to her. “Poisoned him, she did. Oh well. He was half-gone in his mind already only we never knew it. Certainly not me, young and randy, I’m sorry love, my name in the papers and every night a new club opening or a crime lord to raid or something else to do. It was a heady time. I’m sure you’ve had your fair share.”
“Go on.”
“Well he gave me you,” she says hesitantly. “Sorry Joe, it’s corny I know –”
“And stop speaking in rhymes.”
“I didn’t know at the time I wasn’t the only one who spent time with John during that period,” my mother goes on like my wisecracks are nothing, which is to say it’s situation normal around here. “I don’t know if it was part of the Plan or not, considering it wasn’t, you know, until before the Kirlians that he even tried the whole Doomsday Man thing.”
“Plan?”
“It’s what he called it,” Georgia says.
“Called what?”
“Well, having you,” she says in a way that totally creeps me out, chills flushing down my body hard enough to make me stand, covering my distraction by a brisk walk to the kettle for a refill.
“You and all the other children. All your brothers and sisters.”
I drop the kettle and stare hard at the floor, the expanding pool of distilled water as good as blood for all I care. When I look up there are tears pouring silently down both their faces and Tessa, like the young saint she is, scurries across to right the kettle and refill it and put it back on to boil.
*
I SIT HEAVILY at the table and try not to fry anything.
“Tell me more about what you said: about my brothers and sisters.”
“Half-brothers and sisters,” Maxine says from somewhere to the side, perhaps half-a-million or so miles away.
“You were born in, what was it, ‘77 Joe?”
“That’s right, ma.”
“So you must’ve been six by then. We had that little place in Walden Park, I don’t know if you remember it?”
“I remember the oak tree.”
“Of course. The grandfather tree, poor boy.”
We’re across the round table at a slight angle, close enough that she can reach out and almost touch my cheek, though it is emotion – and recollection – that stills her hand rather than any shortcomings of distance.
“We were living with Jane, I don’t even know if you would remember her. Titanium Girl?”
“Titanium Girl?”
I don’t think this is the moment to confess I used to jerk off thinking about this woman, though like most centerfolds, I imagined these big-breasted, wide-hipped women as giants, unable to imagine any arrangement of scale where I was not the size of a toddler in comparison to those impossibly perfect and manifestly female proportions.
“You’re telling me Aunt Janie was Titanium Girl?”
“We were both single mothers. It made sense to throw in together, though the original Crimson Cowl killed her little Jimmy and after that, well Jane went off a bad way with the drugs and then those photo shoots and then they confined her out at Rykers, back before they had the technology they have now, but she went quite willingly. It was too much for me too and I stopped going out, just concentrated on you. A year or two went by and I was thinking about art school, just an ordinary immigrant girl without a husband and trying to think of a new life and then I met your mother.”
Georgia laughs, wiping away a tear of sadness as the true source of her delight finds focus still in her eye cast across the dining room table, an autopsy of the curried roast underway beneath my fork.
“And then one day out of nowhere John Lennon turns up at our house,” Maxine says slowly, hands clasped over her wife’s and eyes fixed now on mine. “Imagine that?”
“What happened?”
“He was a blithering madman,” Georgia says. “He told me about the Plan and said what he intended to do.”
She shakes her head minutely.
“I didn’t even know if he was serious . . . or that it was possible. He wanted to take you, and said he would be back to collect you and all the other children. When he left, I saw the Ono woman in the s
hadows outside.”
“We left that night and never went back,” Maxine says. “Two days later, the Doomsday Man tried his hand at global genocide and thank Christ he failed.”
“How did he do that?” Tessa asks, daring to pipe up from her position at the far side of the table.
I rake my fingers across my scalp as I try and encapsulate the details of this sad history lesson, but Georgia’s already ahead of me. It’s weird to hear such industry-specific words tumbling from my Irish mother’s mouth.
“He had a map of the world in his head,” she explains. “He’d traced nearly every minor telepath and latent psychic on the globe and found a way to use them as a superconductor for his own powers. He became the Doomsday Man. He made the mistake of co-opting Thoughtstorm, though, a notorious villain of the time, who broke free thanks to his own powers and alerted the Star-Spangled Squadron and the Protectors about what was happening. And they took him down. Down from the edge. No trial or anything, or not till much later anyway. Away he went into White Four, as they called it then. Or White Three.”
“White Four,” Maxine confirms with muted helpfulness.
“And ten years later they just let him go?” I scratch my head and give a whistle. “Astounding.”
“A total balls up,” Georgia agrees.
“And have you heard from him since then, granny?” Tessa asks.
“Oh God, darlin’, please don’t call me that, I’ve said before,” George sighs, almost weeping. “No, thanks be. We’ve kept our heads down, tried to keep your father in the dark, poor boy, just so he wouldn’t find us.”
“He must’ve told you something about this Plan of his, for you to be so afraid,” I say and open my palm as if all my reasoning might be found there.
“I need a cigarette,” George says weakly. “Yes, Joe. He said he’d found a place. A sanctuary. He was moving the other mothers and their children there. He wanted me to come, said he’d give me a day to come willingly before he simply ordered me to do it.”
“Mind control?”
“I think so.”
“But then he went and triggered his Doomsday instead?” I ask, marveling at how flawed it all seemed.
“Your mother always blamed the Ono woman,” Maxine says soberly. “And here’s one of the few times and places where we’ll disagree. There was something in him, then, the same as was always there. Something dark. Yearning. It could’ve been a power for good, for hope. Instead, I don’t know how it works when you can see and do the sorts of things you people can . . . but it turned him black, poisoned him. If it was Ono, if she had a role, then it was just that – a role. I wouldn’t blame her any more than I’d blame the bad LSD everyone was taking back then.
“John Lennon had only himself to blame.”
*
I HAVE THE sincere impression there are still a few big holes in the story. Yet I am damned if I know how to move forward. I don’t think beating the answers out of either of them would feel very good, and like I mentioned before, maybe my mum would kick my ass.
“I can’t believe you just . . . hooked up with him like that,” I say eventually.
“Well, it was John Lennon,” Tessa says.
“Tea?”
Georgia stands shakily and moves with haste across to the kitchen and begins fussing with the cups. It takes her a moment to notice the big dent in the side of their retro kettle and I genuflect and shrug.
“Do you have any photos from that time, gran?” Tessa asks.
“Oh no, child,” George says with her back to us. “Young people nowadays, you’d photograph your own shadow and put it on Deviant Art I know, but you’ve got to remember these were different times. We used to have some clippings, but I don’t know, they faded. Newsprint, you know. . . .”
“I can’t remember ever seeing a baby photo,” I say.
The comment falls into the silence and lays there, a semaphore of neglect, letting me draw my own conclusions along with everyone else.
“So the old sperm donor story’s dead and buried,” I eventually say.
“We’re sorry, Joe.”
“And I guess you came along a few years later than you made out,” I say to Maxine with a Maori nod.
“As you said, you remember the house with Auntie Jane.”
“Yeah,” I shrug. “I guess it’s all a mish-mash for me. Tell me no one ever scrambled my thoughts, did they?”
The pair of them stare at me horrified, like I’ve just asked them to come straight with me on any child abuse since we’re ousting the skeletons from the family closet. I want to explain to them how little I remember of my early years and how much it creeps me out. I only have snatched glimpses of the lady with the honey-blonde hair who, it turns out, was yet another world-famous crime-fighter. Titanium Girl, the old face of Colgate and later Hustler. My aunt, in name if not actuality. It’s enough to make me want to hang my head and cry except these walls do not seem as comforting as they once did. Perhaps they never did. Perhaps this coldness I think has dominated half my life stems back from these secrets more so than any imagined inability of my two mothers to come to grips with having a boy instead of a girl they could fashion in their own image. And maybe, really – and this isn’t a thought comfortable to entertain – maybe it was never about my sex.
“We’d never let anyone touch you, Joseph,” Maxine says reverently, appalled.
“Why do you think we did all this, this craziness?” Georgia asks.
Tears dribble over the crease of her chin.
“Our whole fucking life has been about keeping safe. Keeping you safe.”
Georgia wipes at her face with the sleeve of her pullover.
“Now promise us you won’t do anything about going to find him,” she says.
I pause for breath and stare back, dumbfounded by the request, and find I’m probably not able to say anything sensible. It was enough to make the belated connection about my older half-brother Julian, living in France like a regular lord of the manor, or so says the Internet, a Norman castle in his possession and a string of pop chart failures. Musicians, I don’t know, it’s as crazy as actors, everyone having to cover the mirrors in case they start making out with themselves.
The questions I could field that poor bastard . . . and now they say there were more children, kids my age, and sired by the same super-powerful and ultimately mad-as-fuck schmuck now . . . now what? Disappeared somewhere.
I have to be certain.
“I honestly couldn’t tell you what this means,” I say to them after an awkward delay. “I’m not sure I even would want to meet him.”
Before they can relax I add, “I don’t know I could do anything less. You’ve been hiding from him all this time, ma. Is it because you know where he is?”
But Georgia shakes her head, a touch of well-played regret in there somewhere, convincing me to imagine an old lady reflecting on a life misspent, an affair that could’ve been something so much more, perhaps. And I nod knowingly, appreciating her pain for one genuine moment – which is a shame, because she’s lying her ass off and I’m just too much of a soft touch to know until it’s too late.
Zephyr 4.10 “A Direct Contributor”
ITS THREE DAYS later and we’re civilians again as Tessa and me brace against the cold while visiting the new Bloomingdales downtown of Jackson. There are police everywhere because of the big religious confab the City States guys are having in Washington. Why exactly we need a dark green tank parked like a slab of living newsreel on the corner of New Lexington and Wray I cannot tell you, but the guys with the cool headwear Googling us through slitted eyes as they prove they can smoke and chew gum at the same time don’t look like they’re about to explain. The militaristic tenor to the holiday season doesn’t seem to do much to the crowds, which hubbub around us with the patience of rabid Dobermans and the orchestration of a swarm of bees. It feels very much like Tessa and I are in our own private Idaho as we walk against the flow of savings-fixated humanity, the visit to
the new store just a curiosity, a pretext, as we talk in muttered code, chins in our scarves, the air thick with the city smells of bratwurst, cigarette ash, paranoia and meconium.
“I dunno, dad,” my darling girl says and not for the first time. “If this is all doing for my head, I can’t imagine what it’s doing for yours.”
“Not much damage to a block of wood,” I joke.
“Seriously,” she says in a voice reserved for reciting text messages. “You’ve got to level with me. If the whole, you know, freaking John Lennon thing wasn’t enough, what about what gran said about all the other little Lennonites mixing it up out there?”
“But are they mixing it up out there?”
“Just say what you mean already.”
“Well, look at you and me, honey,” I say and immediately drop my voice as we pass too close to a black guy pulling his best Ray Charles, inch-thick glasses vaguely turned our way. “Apparently we’re of the House of John, if what George says is true, and we’ve got the powers to match.”
“So you’re saying the skies should be thick with ‘em, if what’s said is true?”
“You’re just as sharp as you look.”
“Thanks,” Tessa says and chuckles against the breeze.
We wait on the corner for traffic and the lights go and two cops on horses trail ahead of us, steaming apples the order of the day as tourists snap photographs against their best intuition. A homeless guy who looks like he’s been made-up as part of some frat-boy prank stands on the corner, rouged and bearded cheeks marked by tears as he holds up a cardboard sign that reads YOUR ADVERT HERE $20. A group of school girls rush by smacking parked traffic with their hockey sticks and the industrial-military-police complex must have more important things to do because they pay the ratty chicks little heed as they rush against the banking traffic, horns honking, gulls batting against the hectic breeze as it lifts heads above the main boulevard. A neon sign with an image of me holding a cheeseburger like it is the secret power source of the universe or something gives way to an ad for something else, I’m not sure what else, Black Honey and Shade, two hot black chicks working out in a gym and then rolling around together on a beach, on a sofa with white towel duvet, on a Virginia front lawn, in the middle of a deserted cemetery. I shake my head and think it’s no wonder people get sick of us.
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