“We just . . . left her . . . Grandma . . . to die. She’s . . . the fire, dad.”
I curl my hand and forearm around her head and draw her into me.
“It’s not as simple as that, babe.”
“Why?” she asks, voice muffled.
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“I saw . . . saw . . . Granny Max . . . Who was that?”
Ono.
“I’m not really sure I can say, honey.”
“She controls fire. She can survive that, right?”
“It’s possible.”
“You think she was . . . in the house?”
Tessa can feel me nod. I hold her close. Words are pretty much as useless now as they ever are, their barrenness made stark in the moment.
We stand for long enough I begin to cogitate on the other great fear, us being spotted by photographers. I gently coax Windsong toward the bandstand and we move under the shadowed atrium and the lamplight seems to bend, come twisting down between the leaves to dapple our faces and soften the awful reality. Tessa drinks in a great big staggering breath and I can feel the tears do their work, the all-too mortal soporific Darwin’s gods gave us to compensate for our bite or two from the Tree of Knowledge and Death. A stillness enters the girl and eventually she releases my hand. We are just two leather-clad fugitives from fashion sitting side-by-side like disenfranchised emo kids everywhere, bums on the steps of the rotunda as we contemplate the ineffable.
“You got my phone message?”
“I did,” I say. “When was that? Yesterday?”
“Yes.”
I look sideways a moment, but my daughter has the whole jaded, bored, listless teen thing going on.
“I was taking your advice. I was in France.”
“How did it go?”
“Well, I met Julian,” I say to her. My expression is enough to still any further questions and as a further distraction I ask, “What’s this about England?”
“I don’t know where mom gets these ideas,” Tessa says. “They are thinking about opening another office for Baskin Robbins or whoever the heck it is she works for . . . a London office.”
“Bakhtin-McRoberts,” I say tonelessly.
It’s not really me speaking, more a sense memory made flesh from years of my wife’s dry repetition.
“London?”
“Dad, she’s really into it. ‘A fresh start’.”
“She’s got no idea,” I say and I’m not really sure what I mean by it.
I idly wonder if my mother’s near-impenetrable flesh is cooking within the coals of my childhood home.
Behind the mask, Tessa’s eyes are again welling.
“Will you do something, dad?” Before I can answer, she adds: “I mean, really really do something. Not just one of your promises, okay? I really need you to do this.”
“I’m not sure I can,” I say softly. “I guess I’ll need a lawyer.”
“Well derr, dad,” the girl says. “Jesus, did this just occur to you now?”
“Honey, divorces, they’re really just a formality these days . . . especially if there’s not a lot of money involved.”
She stares at me for a few moments. Big raindrops start to clatter down from what was previously a chill and spotless sky. It’s the trembling lower lip that gets me.
“What?”
“Weren’t you going to . . . fight her for me?”
“Fight her for you?”
Six million frigging lightbulbs and all, but I can be a bit slow, sometimes.
“Custody, dad,” Tessa replies like the very spirit of exasperation.
“Your mum talked about access. . . .”
“And were you going to ask me?” Tessa cries. I say nothing and eventually she adds: “She’s serious about this move, dad. You have to fight it.”
“You . . . want me to fight it?”
The expression on her face is like a time lapse of the dawn, a dozen different things imperceptibly changing at once as she radiates through frustration to hope to anger.
The sky booms. Thunder peals across the city and somewhere close by a skittish security alarm starts up like a startled guard dog. Then the rain comes, just the brush of a wet curtain at first before the real weight of the downpour begins and nearly erases Tessa’s words.
“When are you going to understand? I want to be with you.”
I wouldn’t call it passivity, though that’s how it appears, the resignation to some dumb domestic fate. In my experience, a woman wants a husband who’s easily led, or that’s what I foolishly believed, and I guess for a long time I’ve fallen in with that, especially when compliance is such a lie and all the good things, at least for such a long time, have always happened away in a blaze of ozone and black leather. That said, amid what few good feelings I have salvaged from my wanted yet suddenly unwanted freedom, playing single dad never occurred to me as part of the repertoire.
Sitting across from Tessa, the rainfall little more than the actualization of some daft metaphor, waves of teenage angst roll off her and register as barometric shivers affecting everything from the humidity to the flow of air around us.
My hand goes to her shoulder and gives one of my trademarked hesitant-but-fatherly squeezes. It’s not a gesture of reassurance. I suspect Tessa has been left disappointed far too many times for that.
But it is a commitment of sorts, and for now that is enough.
We depart on separate vectors and I wonder if this is how we will spend our time together if Beth gets her way and moves to England.
Over my dead body.
Zephyr 4.17 “Curious In Its Absence”
SEEKER MEETS ME at a bus shelter near the Colonel Oliver North tennis stadium, me with a rucksack, a new laptop still in its cardboard box, and another cardboard box full of the assorted crap from my past nearly twenty years as a married dude. Seeker’s wearing Marconi aviator glasses, a Ralph Lauren overcoat, a tartan scarf by Zudzi, fawn knee-highs by Rebecca Di Marsi and Finnegan Wake winter jodhpurs. Her wild hair is ensconced within a Hoodlamb eco-fur faux bearskin cap that manages to look sexy on her, not at all like a disemboweled marmot pulled on over her skull. Truly. She has a wry smile for me. Seeker does wry well, like she’s had plenty of practice, and I wonder why that might be until I remember we’ve been teammates on and off the past six, seven years. Uh-huh.
The Wallachians have parked the castle behind a row of porta-potties athwart the dexter quadrant of the stadium parking lot. There is a game on, not tennis, but maybe something equally effete because there are only a few people about, and apart from a handful of security dudes drifting the lot looking for change with their metal detectors, we are alone and unsupervised. We slip in a side door and I follow the lady in white’s delectable behind up a seemingly unending series of stone spiral staircases to a dour corridor with low fires guttering in braziers and I ask, just a little out of breath, how the hell I’m ever going to get used to finding my way around.
“It helps if you keep a firm idea of your destination,” Seeker replies with another of those patented grins.
“What are you saying? That this place responds to intelligent thought?”
“Just any thoughts, even not particularly intelligent ones,” she says.
“I thought it was just, you know, ideational down in the engine room . . . the dungeons,” I say.
We navigate the hallway in a manner not dissimilar to marines on patrol in Fallujah, Ho Chi Minh City, the ruins of Angkor Wat. Seeker directs me to an oaken doorway and it opens just as I reach for the wrought iron handle. Inside, there hides a narrow chamber, a monkish cell with a prison-style bed, a low stone bench and wash table, a wooden stool, HDMI, USB and TV aerial connections along with a triple power station and a built-in universal phone recharger. High on the wall there’s a flatscreen monitor currently tuned to a channel showing nothing but sky.
“Curious mix.”
“Welcome to Hotel Wallachia.”
Seeker has rem
oved the cap and as usual her lustrous long locks make like the prettiest seaweed on the gentlest of Abrolhos tides. There’s a fetching color to her cheeks I fancy isn’t just the freshness of the day or pre-Yule expectation, and I give a grimacing wink when she sits on the edge of the bed to test it. I lay down the box, the housewarming gifts to myself, and then the pack. Amazing how I can travel so light when I’m evicted from the only other life I’ve ever known. But I have vowed not to get maudlin, at least for today.
“The word ‘Spartan’ leaps to mind,” I say. “Still, I appreciate it.”
Seeker nods.
“The brothers will come if you request them,” she says. “They will be able to provide most the assistance you need, though of course you’ll have to remember many of them are observing vows of silence. The abbots will be able to communicate directly.”
“Great.”
“As you were saying, the castle layout responds to unconscious telepathic instruction,” she goes on without even a shrug. “Provided it inconvenience no one, the internal structures are able to re-organize for ease of navigation. It means you won’t have any excuses to be late to round table sessions.”
I grimace again, and not just at the Arthurian reference. It all serves to remind me we’re just thirty-six hours from going live. It’s not exactly stage-fright, but perhaps its evil, insalubrious double.
Seeker falls silent, slowly realizing she is sitting on a bed in a more-than-grown man’s room without a chaperone for possibly the first time in her life. As her cheeks redden and I fail to find even the rudiments of a conversation, the comely woman nods and moves backward to the door like she’s afraid I might pounce on her.
“I’ll, uh, leave you to settle in,” she says.
Once disappeared, I tug the Enercom phone from my pocket and check the charge as I slowly change into my Zephyr rags. The reception is curiously crystal and I get Sal on the third or fourth ring. Something in his tone, arrogant and dismissive as usual, nonetheless fails to dissuade me from a mid-afternoon meet. The story is too good, and this one time, the money’s likewise. I make the time and place and ring off, the grumpy old hack’s irritated, “I was starting to wonder when the fuck you were ever gonna call” barely registering as I consider the strange new course upon which my life’s been set.
After fiddling in my room for a while and setting up the final touches to the new computer, I check in for any news on the house fire. Finding nothing, I go on to the Zephyr noticeboards for a while and resist responding to a half-dozen infuriating remarks from various snot-rags. Bored and a little hungry, I then drift into the corridor and make the mistake of wandering without any fixed destination in mind.
My perambulation turns into the frigging Odyssey, though eventually one of the so called Wallachian abbots takes me by the elbow and guides me into the big, vault-like chamber the New Sentinels will be using as our ready room. It is a stone amphitheater with a long, football-shaped table in the middle, its smoked glass alight in various quadrants with scenes beaming straight from the Internet and news feeds across the world.
Just by glancing at it, I learn British Prime Minister Bowie has been comfortably re-elected, Jerusalem security police have unearthed and obliterated a paramilitary cell intent on milhemet mitzvah (or ‘holy war’), Chinese ethnic Uighars are staging firebomb protests, and students at a classic Finnish conservatorium have led their own protest, playing outlawed nationalist tunes on cellos hooked up to distortion pedals, their performance ending in a baton storm of Russian policemen. Oh, and Milli Vanilli have won their fifth best album Grammy. Love those guys. I crane closer to the footage to see a news feed from Atlantic City showing a dark blue shadow of a man scuttling up the side of a tenement wielding a pair of curved swords – the reporter insists on dubbing him “The Beetle,” which seems a tad unimaginative.
There’s nothing on a house fire in Pierce. In fact, I am beginning to think the news is almost curious in its absence.
I’m so fixated on the table I don’t notice Vulcana sitting in one of the big-backed chairs. Her dark eyes, smudged in their rests, swivel toward me in time to the movement of her seat. Ten more seats crown the table and further back there are more benches abutting other computer gear, the whole thing producing an effect somewhere between Star Trek and In The Name Of The Rose.
“Hi, Connie,” I say and slide into a chair.
I expect the usual abuse about using her real name. Instead, she says nothing.
“Hey, are you OK over there?”
“I’m fine, Zephyr.”
“You sure? You’re sounding a little . . . um, whatever the opposite of illustrious is.”
“Luster-less,” Vulcana answers me like a repetition.
I take a good look at my former teammate, back for another taste of the action despite a close encounter in the autumn that nearly cost her an arm. There are dark rings beneath her dark eyes that mar her sexy Puerto Rican complexion and belie suggestions she’s fit for a return to active duty. Her helm of black hair has grown a few inches since the last time she had an official mishap – seems I was there for that one, too – and the ragged edge cuts across her sloped jaw-line and casts much of her face needlessly into shadow. When her eyes look askance, they seem huge and luminous, despite their darkness. But when they turn back to me, it feels like being stared down by a ghost or perhaps something even worse.
“Are you good for tomorrow night?”
“I’m good, Zephyr,” she says again with all the flatness of the world.
“Sure?”
“I’m tired. Don’t make me repeat myself.”
“How’s the arm?” I ask, pushing it.
Again the black eyes alight on me, leave me thinking about autumn and how it is the true season of death. Things die with the fall. In winter, they’re simply dead.
“I’m fine, Zephyr. Don’t ask me again.”
“Just trying to see if you’re, you know, tight.”
“I’m tight, Zephyr. Tighter’n tight.”
I wink. Here’s a chance to get a real reaction, but she says nothing, merely turns and looks past me like I’m blocking her from watching something far more fascinating. As I ponder my next comment and whether to really aggravate the woman, a bell chimes somewhere within the stone complex and Seeker’s voice rolls out on the ether.
“Team meeting in fifteen minutes.”
Almost at once, blue-suited Smidgeon strolls into the room eating a ham sandwich. Another resident of Castle Greyskull, it is fair to note we have barely met. He has the cap and face mask in place as usual, even as little flecks of grated cheese trickle down the front of his blue-and-red costume. I shouldn’t blame him. I wear the mask at all times myself. Yet there’s something paranoid there, present in every action and mannerism, a nervous tic that could be unpleasant in a teammate. We’ve barely spoken three words together and it’s like someone has warned him off me, which surely can’t be a great thing given the undertaking we’ve signed up to. I choose think he is merely being paranoid about his secret identity, but Seeker says to let it rest until the premiere and then some training exercises should break down the walls. The total sucker I am for hardbodies like her, naturally I just nodded my head and complied.
I take my seat, conscious, like I think we all are, that these are positions we could be holding for many years to come.
How wrong we are.
*
THE VIEW HASN’T changed much on the roof of the Jenssen building. Same pigeons doing their funny little walks, browsing through the cigarette butts and each other’s shit. There is a homeless man asleep on one of the flat-bed air con units, exhausted after rockin’ out with his cock out, a mess of broken glass ouzo bottles around him and his pants around his ankles after he passed out trying to have a goodnight tug. The pigeons land on him, periodically mistaking him for a piece of public art here, forty storeys above Mother Earth, but the guano adds a certain pathos even he was missing before.
Sal emerges from the
stairwell with his usual put-upon expression, huffing slightly, his doggie bag lunch crumpled in one clammy fist. There’s a newspaper under his arm and it’s sheer hubris if it is his own.
I glanced at a copy of the Post on the way over here, astounded Darkstorm’s alleged disappearance could so quickly bump news about the Bloomingdale’s bombing from the front page. The City States symposium finishes tomorrow, other business successfully pushed from the agenda by the Zionists’ attack, though it’s now more likely to result in a draft statement condemning their violence than any buckling in to demands about segregating Jerusalem. The mad fuckers think something written, probably for a lark, two thousand years ago gives them an unbreakable lease agreement on half the Middle East. The news that Indonesia has elected its most moderate president yet, an Indo-African nobody with a white mother by the name of Barack Obama, has put US relations with the Muslim world at an all-time high. President Obama’s words, as newly-crowned leader of the world’s most heavily-populated Islamic state, point the way to a new détente with his positivist election catchphrase Yes we can. Just like the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, it means the fundamentalist hard copies are just pissing in the wind if they think they can get their way by trying to hold the world to ransom.
Besides, there’s five other Bloomingdale’s.
“Hey Sal,” I remark. “Long time, no see.”
“Yeah,” he says in a grouchy voice. “Where have you been, you fuckin’ idiot?”
“Hey, play nice, Mr Doro, or I might toss you off the roof.”
“Tossing off is about all you’re good for, Zephyr.”
“Jesus, Sal. I don’t feel the love. What gives?”
He pushes the crumpled newssheets into my arms like an unwanted baby, which makes me the convent’s mother superior, I guess. I take them reluctantly, still stung by his remarks. As expected, the headline “Dark hero vanishes” spills across five columns above a blurry picture. I shake the page into some semblance of readable form and then can’t concentrate for more than two or three seconds.
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