“Don’t mind me.”
Before he can offer any rejoinder, Loren and Smidgeon walk into the room with two black-hooded Wallachians and a skinny blonde girl in the white costume Loren made famous as Seeker. Now it’s my turn for a double-take. And as I look at the girl, she looks away like the innocent gazelle she must be, her hair in untidy curls masking her face and concealing for a heartbeat the residual glow that is Seeker’s trademark. My eyes flick to Loren and she stares back at me with an anxious, wounded, hopeful kind of expression. I try to smile for her sake and fail, managing at best an impotent leer, and then Smidgeon resumes talking as if none of us were here at all.
“This is the ready room. It’s crammed full of some pretty amazing technology from parallel universes,” he says and barely glances at me and gestures to Stormhawk, who stands along one of the back rows where monitors on white stone shelves glimmer with footage from a dozen different viewpoints.
This is not so much a recruitment speech as a sales pitch, because the girl doesn’t realize she holds the keys to the castle. Without her on board, the New Sentinels, version two-point-fucking-oh, have no magic time-travelling super fortress to house them and cart them around.
“Seeker, this is Stormhawk,” Smidgeon says and motions to the purple guy like he’s introducing a particularly frightening uncle.
“Hey. Pleased to meetcha.”
“Hi,” the new Seeker replies in a tiny voice. “I’m Candace.”
“Oh, don’t tell anyone your name, honey,” Loren says and puts her hand on the skinny girl’s shoulders, and I swear to God, it’s just curiosity that makes me check out the new girl’s little boobies at that moment and also just the same brand of bad luck that Loren looks back and finds me doing it.
“Um, hi. I’m Zephyr.”
I smile wryly and the girl looks startled to actually meet someone famous and then looks confused by the t-shirt and jeans.
“I’m in stealth mode,” I tell her and wink.
I think Candace gets it, but Smidgeon’s narrow face closes down even further and he shepherds her away before anything else can be said.
“Don’t worry about him, Seeker. Zephyr’s also lost his powers. Like me. In fact, we can thank him for this predicament.”
“Jesus, you wanted some action,” I heckle at Smidgeon’s back.
He glares back over his shoulder. It only strikes me for the first time at that moment that he feels somehow jilted, something waspish and nasty in his expression even with the goggles sewn into his blue head-mask. I shrug and he sneers and makes like even acknowledging me makes him feel sick and then its Loren also looking back at me with a strained and uncomfortable expression and then they are headed out the room.
“Jeez, what was that all about?” Stormhawk asks once they’re gone.
“Smidgeon’s just got his panties in a knot. Don’t worry about it.”
Stormhawk harrumphs and says, “He told me what you did, you know. It’s not cool.”
I look at the guy and scowl and eye the table, which appears to be showing footage from the parallel universes where I do actually batter this guy to death at this moment.
“Right,” I snap. “And what did he tell you?”
“Man, you . . . you banged the Seeker, man. And then you radioed in for help when it was a trap and everyone got rolled and lost their powers.”
I am about to mount a spirited defense to these unwelcome charges when I do that rare thing people only sometimes do at the start of an argument and actually ask myself whether the accusation isn’t on the money. I most certainly did, sort of accidentally-on-purpose, rob this dimension of its anointed spiritual guardian. And like Smidgeon and the other fucktards I’ve most recently called my teammates, I didn’t foresee the Hawaiian luau that the Demoness – or should I say Spectra – had planned for me in Tokyo.
I close my mouth and the glass table goes black and I shake my head and mutter something about returning some videos and leave the room.
*
I PAY THE cab driver and step from the curb where an on-site toilet, a concrete mixer and some scaffolding mark the last resting place of my childhood home.
I am wearing Mastodon’s Kucera aviator sunglasses, acid wash jeans, a Taxi Driver-style green anorak and a pair of dirty brown Australian work boots. Over the other side of the construction site, Rebecca Mollins, last known neighbor to my deceased parents, stands by her glistening black SUV and eyes me suspiciously, too new herself to understand I grew up a little boy here. I give a neighborly wave and trudge up the drive stained with concrete dust from the site works, the foundations a giant L-shape on the ground with pipes and sheaths for cables exposed to the cold afternoon sun, a few disinterested workmen earning an honest wage waving cigarettes at ongoing conundrums.
Mike is the foreman I have reluctantly agreed to meet after apparently leaving him far too long in the dark about my precise plans for the house. I thought I made it pretty simple, providing some pictures of the house that used to be there and asking him to put it back. But apparently not. It turns out Mike is a perfectionist and he has enough questions to crash Wikipedia.
So we discuss fine details: the guttering here, the step up into the hallway there. I am distracted by the newspaper Mike keeps leaning his elbows on, something about the Sentinels and a headshot of me above an item about Norwegian musicians dead in a church siege. Sometime in the middle of our discussion over coffee generously supplied from his thermos, Mike is tapping the loose tobacco from the end of a cigarette when he remembers something and he pulls an old Polaroid from a work file and passes it to me.
“One of the boys found it near the fence,” he says. “Can’t have been here too long, since we had that bad rain a few weeks back.”
The photo is of my mum – Georgia, dead now these few weeks – and a guy in a leather jacket with the collar turned up, smoking, a dirty flick of oily hair the most prominent thing to his profile. They are young, or at least Georgia is, and I turn the photo over hoping for a useful notation, but there is nothing. She is as young as I think I’ve ever seen her, but not in costume, really quite unbelievably gorgeous in that Irish milkmaid way of hers I only now uncomfortably realize has been a thing of mine half my life, Elisabeth an O’Shaunnessy before I married her, a curly-haired variant on the usual fair-skinned, dark-haired formula.
“Shit,” I mutter under my breath.
“Family of yours?”
“My ma,” I reply. My eyes sweep up. “I don’t know the guy, though.”
“Reminds me of someone,” he says vaguely.
I nod and he says something else I don’t really take in and I am picturing pouring electricity I can no longer conjure into my mother as she madly charges through the wall of our house, the blue flames dancing along the sleeves of her charred jumper, and I have to wait a bit before I can really speak properly, my face showing very little thanks to a lifetime’s practice being shallow, and Mike starts up with some more questions that are really just statements about fake vintage porcelain and I think of Maxine’s fixation with the items of the past, her 60s teapot collection a charnel ruin now, how I found boxes and boxes of the crap in the woodshed after I sold off Titanium Girl’s rocket car and gave them to Tessa to junk on eBay and perhaps something of my mood catches in the wind like a whiff of the cigarette smoke Mike won’t quite let himself light up and the words die in his throat as he looks at me, looking through the grimy panes of the transportable office, and then I thank him for his time and hear the Zephyr phone with its dubious ringtone ignored in my pocket and I bust out into the clear air again just in time for a light shower and there’s a beep and a reminder on my phone tells me I am late for an appointment I don’t remember making.
Zephyr 7.3 “Lower Frequencies”
THE MESSAGE FROM Synergy is so hesitant and incoherent that I have no idea what she’s on about. I walk, a dejected figure in the light rain, heading back to the main drag as the leafy streets give way to a homeless shelter and
a needle exchange and a soup kitchen van and some big black women singing gospel at the corner under umbrellas salvaged from a recent sports event, seagulls wildly off their usual flight path hanging on the overhead telephone wires I realize probably should’ve been undergrounded years ago. Once I am on the street I find a small coffee shop, the phone to my ear, and order two full breakfasts and a jug of coffee out of habit and I only reconsider my order when the tired blonde behind the counter raises her pierced eyebrow at me, rightly dubious of my ability to pay, let alone my appetite, and I ask for just the coffee and some eggs and doubt I’ll even eat them as I move to a back booth and slide onto the cracked orange vinyl seat and the Federal agent answers her phone.
“It’s me,” I say without much enthusiasm. “Zephyr.”
“Zephyr. Thanks for returning my call.”
“Sounds like you had something to say, but I’m not quite sure what it was.”
“Sorry about that,” Synergy says, as if being incoherent is just part of the job. “It’s a madhouse around here. We need to talk.”
“We’re talking.”
“No. You need . . . I need you to come in,” she says.
I wince.
“That might not be as easy as it sounds. What’s going on?”
“There’s been a. . . .”
“Development?”
“Not quite,” Synergy says, sounding vague again. “Um, I’m really not sure how to explain.”
“Try.”
“Look,” the agent says with an audible groan. I sense her fussing with the distractions on her desk. “This doesn’t come down to me, OK?”
“You’re giving me a bad feeling,” I tell her.
“You really need to come in. There’s a . . . videotape.”
“Footage?”
“No. A videotape.”
A dozen scenarios run through my mind, wondering how I can take to the costume again when I can’t even fly. Zephyr arriving in a taxicab: it just won’t wash. Any nut-job could spot me and I’d be toast.
“I’m in the middle of something delicate,” I say and don’t even sound convincing to myself. “Can we meet somewhere private? I need to keep my head down.”
“Ah, so the police have caught up with you?” Synergy asks.
“What?”
“Where do you want to meet?”
So I tell her.
*
I ONCE TOLD Red Monolith the strobe lights at the Flyaway were a secret defense system against vampires. Poor bastard. The UV lights make Synergy’s costume a shimmering illusion against the suggestion of her taut, sinewy body, her teeth and her heavily underlined eyes glowing as she sees me across the other side of the carpeted chamber and lifts the gauzy toga worn above her body stocking to step down more safely, high heels on her white leather boots, a vague expression of frustration otherwise marring her perfect Ethiopian goddess outlook.
Without planning it, I am with Paragon, Portal, Cipher and some guy called Lark, or The Lark, or maybe I’m just mishearing things, his costume a black cowl and cape, snug leather like mine, designer stubble on the chin jutting from beneath his mask. There are no girls with us except for Brittany Murphy and a friend, both of them completely bombed and sitting at the end of the semicircular booth a short distance away from us. Also in the club tonight are Lynyrd Skynyrd, Robert Pattison, Robert Patrick, Tera Patrick, Patrick Stewart, Stuart Copeland, Alison Moyet, Boy George, Eddie Murphy, an Icelandic comedian named Gunnar Gunnarsson, Yuri Geller, this year’s Playmate of the Year and some Arab dudes who have booked out the back rooms, much to our chagrin, with some Saudi prince called bin-Laden smiling and shaking hands and doling out hundred dollar bills to people in the club like we’re all potential lap-dancers or something. I manage to bag three of them and find two more discarded on the floor.
Synergy has a shoulder bag and she clutches it to her side like a nervous date, chewing on her bottom lip a moment as I stand and she eyes the other masks and suddenly I feel like I brought along the high school basketball team to meet her.
“Um, sorry,” I say, leaning forward to be heard over the insistent pulse of a jungle remix of the latest Marilyn hit. “Trying to keep a low profile.”
“Who are these damned people?” I think she replies, but after a moment’s confusion and my remark about not really knowing Lark or Portal or Brittany Murphy and her friend, I realize Synergy actually said, “You call this a low profile?” and I laugh and try to be genial even though I feel so uncomfortably vulnerable, like a little kid dressed up as a superhero rather than someone with a genuine claim to fame.
“Did you bring the video?” I ask and she nods and I guide her by the elbow up the back of the room and through one of the concealed velvet doors.
Behind, away from the crowd, there is a narrow plywood corridor painted black in lazy brushstrokes up to the first turn and then the music becomes more muted and we are in a narrow walkway like on a building site with naked scaffolding and the plank floor flexing beneath our weight and I gesture for Synergy to follow me into the security office where a guy called Dale takes one of my c-notes and disappears, leaving us alone with a bank of monitors and computer hard drives, and in the corner, one of the old security tape VCRs used earlier last decade.
Synergy looks around like she’s yet to make a final decision and then she huffs and nods and digs into her bag, shaking her head like a disapproving big sister or something as she produces the clunky black cassette.
“OK. I can’t really say I like this very much, but you have a right to see this I guess, though I am showing this to you as an affected family member and not because you’re part of the investigation. Do you understand that?”
“It’s off-the-record,” I say. “I get it.”
She blows a curlicue of copper-colored hair from her brow and looks about to say something derisive before she simply hands over the cassette instead and we breathe new life into the technology of what seems like an ancient civilization. The vertical scroll backs off a moment and a narrow-faced, grey-haired guy leaps into poor quality black-and-white on the monitor.
“Isn’t that the dead guy, Hilfiger?”
“Yeah.”
“How old is this tape?”
“Nearly five years.”
“Fucking hell. What’s going on?”
“Turn it up,” she says.
“Jesus,” I say with an astonishment I am not really completely feeling. “What is this?”
I dial up the volume and the audio isn’t great, especially with the lower frequencies eaten up by the inescapable reverberations of the nightclub.
“. . . and that’s why you have to believe me. . . .”
“I can barely hear this,” I stammer. “What the fuck is this, Syn?”
“Thomas Hilfiger walked into a station house in Johnson in February ’04, asking to speak to some detectives about an unsolved murder upstate.”
“Was there a murder?”
“Y-yeah,” the agent replies, the hesitation enough to get my attention so that I turn my face from the monitor to her and squeeze my eyebrows together and Synergy looks flustered and turns away.
“What is it?” I growl quietly. “Jesus, woman. Can’t you trust me by now?”
“You’ve got to understand, Zephyr, I thought someone else would check the files. You know, cross-reference your mother’s death against similar MOs.”
“Are you telling me that didn’t happen?”
“Hilfiger alerted state troopers to a house fire in Maine, a writer who was dead there. Burnt alive. No visible source to the blaze.”
“Shit.”
“Unfortunately, he also floated the biggest cock-and-bull story local authorities have probably ever heard and no one could corroborate anything except that Hilfiger himself had a watertight alibi. He was in Copenhagen negotiating a deal at the time. A big, high-flying businessman like him, no one could really imagine he was involved except he knew these details no one was able to refute. He was referred to me
ntal health services for assessment and I can tell you, they only realize now he sort of dropped off the system and the police investigation focused on the neighbors of the dead man and couldn’t find much in the way of forensic evidence and it kind of went nowhere from there.
“It’s still an open case,” Synergy says and finally drops her gaze, depleted.
I’m angry. I can feel that, though it is a distant sensation, like knowing somewhere the weather’s turned bad. I wonder, and not for the first time, maybe Beth was right all along and maybe with my powers gone I have half a chance at a normal life without my blood sugars and endorphins and circadian rhythms and all that shit in constant flux, though this occurs to me without any real joy. I keep my voice measured, calm.
“So what was the story?”
Zephyr 7.4 “Abroad In The Multiverse”
AS SYNERGY TELLS it, even I have to concede the detectives had pretty good grounds to declare Hilfiger insane. It doesn’t do much to mitigate my bad feelings. The cops fucked up on this and now so have the Feds.
Hilfiger told them he and a bunch of other middle-aged dudes used to be superheroes in an alternate reality until they decided they had become part of the problem rather than the solution for the world’s woes.
“We hung up our capes. Like, forever. But that wasn’t enough,” he told the scowling officers on a winter’s night five years ago.
They were called The Twelve. And they concocted a scheme where they would somehow collapse their reality into that of another parallel where they had all led wildly successful, but otherwise completely ordinary lives. And when it was done they’d have no memory of their past and the world would no longer suffer for what had become their tyrannical reign.
“Suffice to say, the cops didn’t buy it,” Synergy says and she takes the short stroll around the control room and turns and I examine her fine butt as she selects a fresh place to rest it up against the computer consoles and then I fold my arms cross my heavy-feeling chest.
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