Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  “What?”

  “I don’t really think you miss your powers. I think you miss being Zephyr.”

  I shake my head at the stupidity of her statement and smack my lips to show my displeasure before returning to my meal more desultory than I was before.

  “You should think about it,” she says.

  “You think about it,” I answer her. “Lioness.”

  “I only did that for you,” Loren says. “But maybe that’s the answer.”

  A match flares somewhere in the back of my thoughts, but as soon as it is born, the hope gutters and dies as I remember all the other realities I’ve been desperately trying not to entertain.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The people are wondering about where Zephyr’s gone,” she says.

  “He’s disappeared before. They can speculate.”

  I wonder how Loren can even say such things, since we have no TV or phone line and I haven’t fired up my computer since we moved. Then again, she actually sometimes leaves this place. Not me.

  “And if he’s not back?” she asks.

  “If this is you trying to make me feel better, stop. You’re doing it wrong.”

  “Think about it,” Loren says and drops her bowl into a pile of discarded clothing and slides behind me, in the grip of genuine enthusiasm now, her hands cupping my shoulders and massaging the tense flesh. “What about all those bad guys getting away with things? All those mad, bad, crazy motherfuckers we’ve taken on over the years.”

  “Motherfuckers?” I laugh at the caustic language about as natural-sounding as Mandarin from her mouth. “Guys like Crescendo and Hubris and Grimoire would eat me for breakfast now.”

  “And this Spectra woman?”

  “Yeah. Her too,” I say. And her brats.

  “What about all the others guys? The Turncoats and the Madrigals and the Fallouts of the world?”

  She punches my shoulder and slides down next to me resplendent in one of my white singlets and a pair of lacy briefs.

  “Hey, what about The Snark and The Fell,” she says, referring to a pair of super-powered serial killers I haven’t thought about in ten years. “Didn’t you lose your powers for a while or something fighting them?”

  “Not the same,” I sigh and then sigh again at the recollection. “I was so much younger then. They paid Zero to lure me in and the fucker cancelled my powers while they attacked. They were killing masks. Had a collection of them.”

  “And you stopped them.”

  “Yeah.”

  I nod, unable to refute it.

  It doesn’t mean it makes any sense. And it doesn’t mean I can stop thinking about it, either.

  I turn to Loren and squeeze her in my big arms and she purrs like a pussycat and I let her drop me on my back on the bed as she straddles me, playful as she snarls, pinning me down, and my strength is at one and the same time a reminder of the power I’ve lost as well as what I still possess.

  Zephyr 7.8 “Eighteen Or Nineteen”

  OKAY, HERE’S A motherfucking flashback for you.

  I’m eighteen or nineteen, I guess a year out of school and my moms still waiting for me to break them the bad news about college while I spend my nights and most my days dressed in a gaudy red-and-white lycra get-up that started as a hand-me-down from Captain All-Star and became my own with a little of Elisabeth’s best needle-work. Cocksure and arrogant, in the summer I defeat the Ill-Centurion for the first time and then take on the Incredible Smoking Man, Tabitha – Queen of Cats, Wendigo, the Tungsten Terror, and even team up for a while with the original Dark Arrow.

  Then I run into Diamond Destiny, a relic from the late 70s who I don’t take seriously enough when I foil her and a band of goons trying to steal a particle laser or some such shit from a Navy base and the old bitch beats me to a pulp and leaves me for dead on the Jersey train line.

  I am rolling over and groaning softly and making small noises of self-pity when a hard-as-nails voice grunts and I am dragged off the rails.

  “You can’t fight for shit, boy,” the man says. “Got plenty of punch, but fuck. You got no idea what to do with it.”

  I may or may not mutter something about being happy to show him what I can do and the voice suggests I wait till I’ve been released from rehabilitation and its then I realize the rock-hard old slut has broken both my legs and shattered my shoulder-blade. I’m as good as fucked, to coin a phrase, and I look up groggily with a grin on my splintered face and notice the guy doing all the talking is wearing a mask too.

  And I groan.

  “I’m Hawkwind, kid. Look me up when you get out of traction if you want to learn what to do with all that spunk.”

  In and out of consciousness, I listen as he uses a police radio to call on a favor and two paramedics arrive in the middle of the deserted old train yards and I am carted onto a gurney and when I come to next I am in the back room of Mercy Hospital as an unregistered guest, a doctor I will come to know pretty well down the track named Greerson feeling my wrist and asking me about my healing factor.

  Days go by. Well, weeks. The bones knit and do their job straight, thanks to early intervention, showing clearly my powers haven’t deserted me. All the same, as the weeks turn into a month since my pounding, I find it’s not so much the power as the urge to make like a Christmas tree has left, almost completely. Beth’s undertaking her first abortive attempt at college and Max and George are making noises about an inner city apartment as I mooch in the old back room. Clearly they’re never going to sell, but even at nineteen or whatever I am, I can read the adult clues saying they’re not thrilled to be giving board to a teenage layabout. Of course, my story about falling down a disused well while drunk to explain my injuries probably didn’t do me any favors, but I just couldn’t admit to even a watered-down version of the facts where anyone got the jump on me.

  Beth comes on one of her visits down from Ithaca and its then I realize it’s been two months since Zephyr last flew and the week doesn’t go great and she heads back to school not knowing it’s going to be her last semester, her dad’s death and my post-pubescence playing havoc with her studies. George comes in and sits on the end of my bed just moments after I finish beating off to a Pamela Anderson spread in Playboy (hard to believe she was ever hot, or once had normal breasts) and tries to get to the bottom of my business, but of course I brush her off, sitting up in bed with my underpants around my ankles under the covers not being very conducive to anything deep and meaningful.

  And the summer dies and the papers speculate about the mystery disappearance of the young hero, the myth of Zephyr just starting to gather pace.

  *

  I CRUISE JERSEY for a week before I even admit to what I am doing. The whole time Hawkwind’s tailing me, though I only learn that later.

  The ornery old bastard calls in Streetsweeper, dead from HIV these long years now, and then sits on the roof of an old cannery and watches the super-strong brawler hand me my ass four or five times before there’s a whistle and Streetsweeper drops his guard to give me that rich mahogany grin of his and I deck the prick and stand panting and triumphant while Hawkwind appears to scold me like the surrogate parent he eventually becomes.

  “Go easy on Sweep, Zephyr. That little performance was for my benefit,” Hawkwind says as he strides across the empty lot, the whole area just a rusting amusement park for rats and looters, the people moved to new homes in Grant and Harding in the last of the Kirlian relocations.

  Hawkwind wears his trademark brown get-up, the avian cloak, scaled armor over his chest and shoulders and a mask that includes goggles and a hard curve of beak over his many-times-broken nose. Streetsweeper gets up from where I dropped him, grinning still and rubbing his broken jaw as it slowly knits back into place. His skin is the color of carpet underlay and he stands about six-ten, carrying maybe four hundred pounds.

  These guys are strictly what I’d call low grade. At least that’s what I’d say today. When I was nineteen and only
about two-thirds the power I commanded at my peak, their age and experience and sheer streetwise grit impressed me, though that did little to cut down my attitude.

  “Shouldn’t’ve dropped his guard,” I snap.

  “Like you and the Diamond Dog,” Hawkwind asks. “How’s the legs?”

  I hang my head, response aborted, tongue like a rolled up pair of gym socks in my mouth. Hawkwind laughs and Sweeper’s deep baritone fills the rusting lot and we walk a little and I slowly explain my problem. Hawkwind doesn’t mock me, only nods and presumably gives Streetsweeper the cue to fuckoffski, and so we walk a little longer and Hawkwind, who’s been on the street for ten years already at this point, leads me to the place where I will train on-and-off for the next five years, no costume, no obvious hint of my powers when I can help it, just me and a bunch of other local toughs in aikido gis or sweat pants under the hulking frame of the dispossessed auto-parts warehouse Hawkwind owns under one of his many aliases.

  In those years I get married and Tessa is born and Beth returns to law school and I continue on with my Zephyr-ing, and Hawkwind and I don’t discuss again my awful confession: that getting beat so bad made me afraid to take to the sky again. It’s something I work through. Hell, I’m back on the beat within a few weeks of Hawkwind’s self-help course. Of course, back then it wasn’t that I’d had my powers taken from me. All the same, the old man is in my thoughts now more than I’d like to admit, and I don’t even know where he’s gone. It’s been a long time since we even sparred on the phone, let alone in the street.

  Zephyr 7.9 “Secret Identities”

  THE WEEK TURNS cold and my ongoing failure to make any decisions is like a shrink-wrapped meat tray rotting at the back of the refrigerator of my mind. We are shopping for vegetables at the Asian market we discovered on Turner and Vine and laughing like an actual happy couple as Loren thrusts a wet broccoli in my face, walking advertisements for a winter woolens campaign or something, when the Blackberry in my pocket starts up and Loren wrinkles her nose and asks me why I haven’t done something about the ringtone even though we reset it together the night previous.

  It’s Tessa’s school. For a moment I am alarmed that they have this number, and then my paternal instinct kicks in and I am barely able to hear the tutorial voice of the starched English woman over my hitching breath and the thundering pulse in my ear.

  “She what, sorry? Please say that again?”

  “I said this is her third absent day in a row and today we haven’t even received a call,” says the woman, a Mrs Woodcock, if that even sounds credible.

  “Oh . . . really?”

  “I’m aware your daughter doesn’t live with you. However, we were advised Tessa’s mother is on a work trip to England and she would be lodging with you?”

  “In England? No. That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “The school requires attendance from all students, Mr –”

  “Yeah, okay. I’m onto it. Thanks for calling. And watch out for splinters.”

  I give Loren a grin I’m not really feeling, which means I’m fooling no one as I click the Enercom phone shut and the fresh fruit and the fish display and the bright bunting of the hot corn cart all become a blur under the market’s powerful internal lights and I simply start walking away and Loren has to ditch our last few unpurchased selections to catch up with me as I hit the street and the cold day means steam is oozing from the grates and the rear ends of the taxis that seem to be endlessly cruising by, drivers looking through their opposite windows to ogle Loren who looks fetching in a wool cap by Dior, a scarf by Tracey Almond, a white Versace wool jacket and fashion jodhpurs by Bruce of Nepal. I have on a thick Dr Who trench coat we bought at the flea market and a rat-eaten scarf and my customary work boots and the only concession to style are my aviator sunglasses and a dog-eared copy of Glamorama in my coat pocket. I stand at the curb and let the world whiz by for a few seconds before I manage to contain it all and it resolves.

  “I have a daughter,” I tell Loren at the edge of the street without actually looking at her. “I have a daughter and she’s about to turn sixteen and she’s been playing hooky from school.”

  “You have a daughter?”

  Different flavors of surprise swirl across her face and Loren suddenly looks flustered.

  “A sixteen-year-old?”

  “Yeah,” I say, and now I meet her eyes and she looks at me as a flush rises to her face. So I tell her, “She’s Windsong. My daughter is Windsong.”

  The slap sounds like a rifle shot in the chill air and I stand beside the string bag of dumped groceries as Loren strides away and I am left like an alien scientist marveling at the new phenomenon of such an utterly normal reaction to my deceit.

  Then I dig the phone again from my jeans and try Tessa’s number one more time.

  *

  ON THE SKY Rail from Van Buren, the new trains have satellite TV and the rest of the carriage watches entranced as Brasseye leads a revamped Sentinels line-up that includes the new Seeker, looking thin and gawky, Stormhawk, Mastodon, and the organic brick Susurrus, into battle against gigantic spider robots invading New Hampshire at the bequest of the Clockwork King. I admit I am more than a little put out as I sit on the uncomfortable bench and watch my fellow commuters gawp and meep at the screens and swap inanities and tweet about it and update their Myspace statuses and generally jizz in their collective pants.

  None of which puts me in a great mood for disembarking in the old neighborhood, where I do my Taxi Driver routine up the shit-cluttered footpaths, still a little addled from the night before and my ever increasing experiments with the sudden ability to get well and royally roasted. Loren has a job, though she is being secretive about what exactly she’s doing, and her father’s vintage Triumph motorcycle now lives at the bottom of the fire escape, shielded from the elements by a tarpaulin and the dumpster from the Vietnamese take-out. And introducing the existence of my child into the equation isn’t going to soften things if my still-stinging cheek is anything to go by.

  Rain starts to fall as I round the corner to my old apartment building and I do the classic Hitchcock shot of looking up with the monolith towering over me and a taxi goes past and splashes my leg and I retreat to the 24-hour deli for a Coke slushie and a microwaved burrito before finally having the requisite mix of courage and preservatives to be able to jog across oncoming traffic and in through the dirt-spattered glass door of the building and up the stairs rather than the elevator.

  The door opens after my second round of hammering and Tessa stares blankly at me with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth and a new lip piercing and the sound of what might pass for music in some subcultures gushing from the living room speakers. It looks like there are other people in Beth’s apartment and Tessa and I exchange gormless expressions for a moment before she takes the smoke from her mouth and sags a little against the open door, one arm above her head resting along the frame as if either to keep me out or suggest she’s holding up the building on her lonesome.

  “What do you want?”

  “The expensive private school you begged to be transferred to called and said you haven’t been showing up,” I say.

  “And what’s that to you?”

  “Whoa,” I say and push my way into the place that used to be as familiar to me as the back of my own hand. “What’s with the hostility here?”

  A girl stands rolling a joint in the kitchen to the right of the entry wearing lingerie briefs and a half-length black singlet and her dyed black hair is twisted like broken straw and piled on top of her head and pinned there with a pair of jade chopsticks. A tattoo of a Chinese dragon adorns her bony side. Down the hall I see a blonde girl with ringlets and a Eurasian chick with a nose piercing, spiky hair and black fingernails peer around the final doorframe before the living room where the TV is on and I can see images of a recent Pepsi commercial where Nautilus is crushing cans and doing something unnatural with a dolphin.

  “What the fuck’
s going on here?”

  “You’re crashing my party,” Tessa says despite the fact it is before eleven in the morning. “Don’t you have your own lingerie model to go play with?”

  “The school said your mom was in London.”

  “Manchester,” Tessa says icily. “She’s in Manchester.”

  “They said you told them you were staying with me.”

  “I told mom that too,” she says and shrugs. “Doesn’t mean I’m doing it.”

  The girl in the kitchen fumbles something and a few dirty plates slide from the bench and shatter across the floor like bones breaking. Laughter comes from ahead. The furrow in my brow feels like it got there from an axe and I hear myself growl, the blackest of moods descending.

  “OK. I need to talk to you in private, baby. Party’s over.”

  I move into the kitchen and aim my thumb at the front door and tell the Suicide Girls to pack up and get the fuck out. No sooner have the words left my mouth than Tessa angrily stomps up behind me and spins me around by the shoulder and I go slamming backwards into the wall and lose my footing and the air explodes from my startled lungs.

  Tessa stares at me horrified as the girl in the kitchen tip-toes through the broken crockery and into the bedroom to retrieve her clothes.

  “Dad,” Tessa gasps. “What the hell was that?”

  I don’t say anything. I don’t know if it’s the embarrassment or the concern for our secret identities, but I stand again with a scowl and pat imaginary dust from my jeans and Tessa steps closer and gives me an experimental prod in the chest and I am unable to stop from staggering back against the wall and I growl and look at her pretty much helplessly.

  “Jesus Christ, dad. What the hell’s happened to yours powers?”

  *

  AFTER THE MODELS have gone, Tessa makes hot chocolates and we sit on the sofa looking through the wide bay windows at the grey pall throwing the city into shade. She has been crying in the kitchen and I dare not ask why, the mascara she has clearly taken to wearing now as good as evidence from a crime scene betraying her emotional state. Weirdly, stripped of my considerable powers, I feel more calm than I can actually remember, sipping from the sweet hot drink and crossing my legs and looking out across the panorama with the television now mercifully muted. If only my life wasn’t a shambles, I could be happy. Images from a show about Eskimos battering seals to death play as Tessa picks at the corners of her eyes and draws sustenance from the big pullover into which she’s changed.