“I was just trying to tell that joke of yours,” Paragon bleats with the comedic skill and timing of a honking goose, “but you do it, Zephyr. It’s so funny.”
“Paragon, man, you’re bombed. What the fuck are you talking about?”
The ordinarily good-looking, gently glowing hero laughs like something from Revenge of the Nerds. It’s as if the alcohol turns him into someone from Holland.
“You said to me once, man, that if there was a parallel universe where you were in charge, all the men would be put into camps and the unit of currency would be the blowjob.”
The volume drops across the table and a second later Mastodon explodes in laughter so hard he starts choking. The nearby starlet quickly slams him on the back and in the middle of the fit – well, I dunno what happens, if it’s the young starlet or if the old guy kicks his leg or something – Mastodon explodes into his larger size and the table rocks and tips sideways and a sea of ashtrays and used nachos plates and whiskey shots and beer glasses with cigarette butts in them and stained drinks coasters and gaily-colored swizzle sticks go clattering onto the floor and I am reminded of the Hell Gate Bridge disaster and the burning cars and buses and the abandoned minivan that collected up poor dumb dead Sky Blue and took him into the river, never to be seen again.
“Come on, Paragon,” I say blithely, because of course my thoughts are a million miles away. “You’re making that up. No-one could ever make blowjobs a unit of currency. You couldn’t give them away.”
While my comment doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t matter. It’s pure Zephyr. It’s expected. So much so the laugh would’ve cued even if I’d told Paragon I wanted to cut off his arms and legs and screw his tits. This is one of the small sad truths I’ve come to acknowledge about these people long ago. Sometimes my companions are the definition of style over substance.
Only for Tessa, a la Windsong, the whole experience is new.
“Dad!” she cries, shocked, and is probably about to say a whole heap more when she realizes what she’s barked aloud and remains sitting there with her mouth now hanging open like the world’s most perfect fly trap.
The mirth dries up so fast it feels like quicksand. Mastodon eyes me and then her and slowly wipes one eye with the back of his enormous hand.
“Heh. He’s right of course,” the ‘Don says calmly like nothing’s happened. “Not much use in a currency that only flows one way.”
“What do you mean?” Paragon replies, arguing for all the world like we were talking about a possible actual world here and not a non-actual – an in fact entirely hypothetical – world mentioned in passing once in a joke I made some time that obviously registered more for Paragon than me because I am damned if I can recall it at all.
“If all the men are in prison camps, they’re hardly gonna be handing out one dollar blowjob bills, are they?”
“Just ‘cause you’re in prison doesn’t mean you don’t have blowjobs, Para,” Mastodon laughs, and the others – with the exception of Windsong, who like myself, is staring frozen across the table-top tundra unbelieving at what just happened unnoticed – burst into bright and bubbly humor yet again.
I remove the starlet’s hand from my leather-clad crotch and wriggle free of the table, shooting Windsong a glance that means business. The young newcomer clears her throat and with the frivolity around us, it hardly draws any attention that we slip out the back within seconds of each other.
Zephyr 5.2 “Up For Another Spankin’”
“JESUS CHRIST DAD, what was all that about?” Windsong snaps as she follows me around the bend to where a curving wall of black curtains obscures the service exits for the DJ booth and the kitchens.
“Hey, judge me for me and what I say,” I reply, “and not what some doofus like Paragon says I say.” I shake my head with controlled irritation and add, “And you need to get a handle on the whole father-daughter thing in there. You’re lucky these people have trouble hearing anything over the sounds of their own egos. All it could take is another dumb snap like that and our secret’s blown.”
“I thought ‘dumb’ was one of those no-go words for parents, you always said,” Tessa grunts dourly.
“I don’t think you’re getting that I can’t be your father here,” I say and draw right in close in case our voices should carry. “I’m Zephyr, honey. You’re Windsong. We need to manage this – manage it, and keep it separate.
“You shouldn’t even be here,” I continue. “And what’s the idea of turning up with her, for chrissakes? Do you have any idea how old that woman is? She’s been doing her thing almost as long as I’ve been doing mine.”
“I know,” Windsong replies and checks her face mask. “She’s always been one of my role models. You know. As a, uh, dyke.”
“Does she know how old you are?” I snap. “Honey. Windsong. This isn’t a fancy dress party. It’s all champagne and caviar because tomorrow we might die. Don’t you understand that? Didn’t your first little unscheduled adventure teach you anything?”
I shake my head, well aware I am losing her with my peacock’s display of frustration.
“You think this is just some opportunity to get a tumble with someone famous you’ve always admired?”
“Jesus, dad.”
She pushes me away hard because I am now way too close and there is some real force in that blow, though obviously not enough.
“I remember my last ‘little’ adventure just fine and I handled it well, thank you very much,” she says.
“Beginner’s luck.”
“Thanks for nothing.”
She stares at me a moment, and wordless, speechless, shakes her head with her mouth open and her domino mask welling with tears and it is too late for me to put my hesitant hand forward, but I do it anyway. And of course she throws me off and storms past.
I stare at the empty space where she was standing instead of following her back through the club, so when I turn and see Shade there, I’m not entirely prepared for the sisterly hostility.
“I don’t know what you think you’re pullin’ with my lady-friend there, Zephyr,” she says in her too-contrived Brixton street voice, “but now you pulled the wrong nigga at a bad time-of-the-month.”
She steps in and grabs me while I innocently protest and next thing I know I’m crashing through brick and plaster and down a concrete emergency stairwell and the landing comes up just in time for me to slam into it with my jaw.
I flounder like something wet and spineless and come to my knees just in time for Shade to arrive via a massive leap and then a hard left to the side of my temple flips me over. For a blind second I can’t understand the woman’s anger and then suddenly I am boiling over with my own – not just the injustice of this moment, but of everything, angry for my ruined marriage and conceivably dead mother, my screwed-up paternity, custody battles, Tessa’s impenetrable sorrow and misbegotten sons and cunting daughters across the universe. I clamber up with a roar, hands like the Wolfman as I grab at Shade and get her by the throat and her shimmery jacket and ram her hard as a tank into the nearest concrete pillar.
The breath explodes from the British bint, but she doesn’t give up, meeting my every excess with an enthusiasm I lack the cognition to question. Locked in battle, her forearm under my chin, her other hand at my belt, we dance like Terminators, slamming through a wall and into an underground car park, knees and elbows hammering home. Sleeping automobiles wake as they are pushed squealingly aside, their alarms flickering into life, tires bursting, a restored ‘56 Chevy flipping over when I finally get a hand free and scramble for purchase. I butt my head down hard, connecting with Shade’s temple. If you’ve ever laid into one of those proper old-time porcelain toilets (long story), that’s what this feels like, hard and unremitting as Shade grits her teeth and a trickle of red stuff seeps from her busted, snarling lip. She flips me over and slaps me in mid-air and I hurtle across the lot, rebounding from a concrete pillar only to crash through one of the subterranean barriers
blocking access to even greater depths.
I only just manage to slow my fall onto the underground roadway. It is always night within the underpass. The lights of dozens of oncoming vehicles glare at me as I fall with the rain of concrete to the road’s edge. A black shape descends in a swooping arc and I hold out my palm and lightning lances in a flash of brilliance to little effect other than to turn Shade even blacker still. She lands running, fifteen or so paces away, and by the time she gets to me, she throws herself into the most intensely badass roll I’ve ever seen to come at me low and fast as a freight train, the collision like stormfronts fucking, both of us skittling across the roadway breathless, growling and desperate.
Cars swerve and honk around us. Miraculously none connect, though there are sparks from vehicles sideswiping each other and horns braying like the warnings of fell preternatural beasts. I’m on my back looking up and Shade grabs a two-ton lump of broken concrete and slams it down where I no longer rest as I roll aside, tug a traffic sign from the curbing and slam it into my assailant with lethal force. Shade makes a noise like a glass bottle exploding and vanishes into the path of a passing heavy tanker. The galloping lorry immediately starts giving up sparks and chunks of tire rubber and clouds of smoke as it slows against its own natural momentum. And as it stops, by its still-functioning headlights, I see Shade stagger out from the truck’s shattered grille, other traffic screeching around her as she lopes back toward me across the debris-strewn underground battlefield.
She is running rather than flying. I look up to discern a perfect path to egress and I take it, doing the crouch thing as I hurtle up past five flights of submerged parking and twenty more storeys of high-rise, the lights from Transit shining only in my memory as I head for the black space in-between.
Shade follows, a charcoal dart in the Witching Hour blackness, a carbon-colored Exorcet on my tail.
*
WE TWIRL OVER the city, breaking through clouds and catching the first winking suggestion of satellites as we duck and dive like Messerschmitts in a mating ritual. I have speed on her and from time to time I can flip and let loose with an electrical blast, however she is agile even without the same speed, and whether it’s my residual anger or the same kind of pugnacious inability to let go that has dogged me my whole life, there’s such a feeling of inevitability about all this that the best I can do is choose the battle ground. After leading her a merry chase across half the sprawling metropolis, punctuated by bursts of Cockney invective, I descend toward the shadowed bulk of the abandoned historic enclave on Hart Island in the East River.
I land hard, breath troubled in my lungs knowing Shade is close behind. One look at the pitch black sky tells me nothing and I sprint for the nearest building, the ruins of an historic workhouse once part of the overall living museum before the Kirlian barrage reduced it to steaming chunks in ’84. There sounds a telltale thump behind me and I make the battered wooden barn doors just as a discarded truck engine smashes into my wake.
“You really want me dead, huh?” I yell over one shoulder as I plunge into the darkness.
Excuse me if I don’t catch her reply. A moment after the big doors swing closed after me, they explode inward again, shards of wood cutting through the air.
“Zephyr, you total arse.”
Shade walks in scrunching her fists into her palms.
There’s some sort of dicky historic-looking cart or something. As Shade dodges it, I light her up with my counter-attack and she makes a Marx Brothers noise and topples backward with smoke coming from her. To her credit, she rolls out of the metallic jacket and cricks her neck and glares at me across the gloom.
“Come fight me, tosser,” she says.
“You don’t take losin’ too good, lady.”
“Losing? Who’s losing?”
I indicate her with a nod, in case there’s any doubt. It is dark, but I can discern her expression by the moonlight coming in one course of busted windows, positioned high on the derelict factory wall.
“I’m happy to call it even,” I say. “It’s not really a good night for me.”
“Well, you ain’t pushin’ around a little girl any more, are ya?”
I glare. I want to resist the words, but I can’t.
“She’s my daughter.”
“She’s what?”
“You heard me,” I say, regretting the admission already.
With all the details leaking about my secret identity, I may as well set up a booth and sell tickets.
“Is that good enough for you?”
“Blimey, fella,” Shade says and puts her hands on her hips. “Why’n’t you fuckin’ say so?”
“You sort of interrupted a father-daughter moment.”
Shade starts laughing.
“Explains a lot, actually. Consider your arse-kickin’ compliments of the chef.”
“Sweetie, I could’ve had you six ways from Sunday, but I’m a gentleman.”
Shade slowly regains her natural color as the power leaks from her skin. She has a comely smile, but angled toward me and clothed in skepticism, I can’t say I’m pleased to see it.
“That so?” She slowly and deliberately cracks her knuckles. “Wanna prove it?”
I say nothing. Shade moves closer, then right in close, and I fold my arms over my chest as she reaches out and puts her hand around my bicep and gently squeezes.
“What do you say, big man?”
“I think we’ve both had enough for tonight,” I tell her. “Can I trust you to keep the family secret?”
“Windsong? Yeah, she’s just a kid. I knew that. Makes me feel a bit better, tell you the truth, to know she’s not out playing dress-ups with her parents thinkin’ she’s some kid runaway or something.”
I nod, noting also Shade’s hand remains seemingly glued to my upper arm. I raise an eyebrow, a gesture made possible by my canny mask design, and the black woman gives a throaty laugh.
“What do you say?”
“I thought you were a dyke or something?”
Shade shrugs. “Nothing’s ever as simple as that, is it?”
“I guess not.”
She removes the hand, but the unexpected tension remains. Somehow I am able to adopt an easy grin with my cowboy face that has helped me stall for time in some of the toughest situations in my life.
“Actually, she told me you’d been a hero of hers,” I say and hope that’s not breaking any great confidence. “I don’t know what she told you. . . ?”
“Asked me advice,” Shade says and shrugs and gives the tiniest fey laugh. “Not sure I’m the best one to ask for anythin’ complicated. You’d know what it’s like, Zeph. Ain’t exactly a straight-forward career, is it?”
“No.”
“I was just a kid when I started. Got old real quick – me and the racket.”
“You look pretty good to me.”
“Mr Smooth,” Shade says and laughs. “A bit more mellow than when you was hangin’ with the Jacks, eh Zephyr?”
“All that testosterone. . . .” I say and wave the explanation away.
The woman nods.
“So that’s that, then?”
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” I tell her.
Shade laughs.
“Look me up next time you’re in the UK,” she says. “I might be up for another spankin’.”
I am too startled and aroused to answer. With another wry, superior black woman’s grin, Shade steps through the ruined door and disappears into the sky.
Her departure lets me unclench. My fists uncurl and as the blood starts to pump through my heart again, there’s only one part of me still rigid. I give another wry grin to the empty workhouse and wander in Shade’s wake, drinking in the cold breeze, the helicopters over the river, the city a dazzling fortress of Schweppervescence and me on the lonely black banks with the dead fish flapping their last in the polluted, silent waters.
Zephyr 5.3 “Like Tony Danza in Rocky”
THE PHONE WAKES me from
a dream of teaming up with Sly Stallone and Bruce Willis to stage a comeback tour, stadium gigs across the continental US, Van Halen opening for us, me playing intricate lead breaks although me playing guitar in real life more resembles a man trying to choke a small and not particularly compliant dog, and of course that none of the other band members are musicians by trade either should’ve had me ringing alarm bells. I wake instead to the sound of Beyonce’s Sweet Child O’ Mine and realize Tessa’s been fucking with my phone again and I wonder how long time is compressed in dreams that this stupid ringtone could influence the whole damned thing.
I literally clear the scum from my mouth with one finger, something about the humidity in this place making me wake feeling like an inmate in a Thai prison, not that it’s hot. In fact, the millennial cold of the stone floors and walls only enhances the prison ambience, which makes sense if you accord with Foucault, who could’ve easily found a parallel between the monastic cell and the penitential one.
“Zephyr, it’s Mayor Pikes’s office.”
“Ah, the angelic voice of Alison Kirkness if I am not mistaken.”
“For once, you are not,” the mayor’s PA archly replies. “I am calling on behalf of the mayor, but also Senator Keenan and in fact the United States Government, Zephyr.”
“Sounds serious. What gives?”
“We were hoping to book a meeting. It’s serious. I mean, it is serious.”
“Uh-huh,” I reply, never overly fond of this particular human being. “And I’ve got a lot on myself, so how about a clue?”
“Senator Keenan only authorized me to say it’s a matter of national security,” Kirkness says.
“Right. Anything else?”
“It’s a matter of national priority, Zephyr,” she says stiffly again. “How soon could you be at City Hall?”
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