“If we want to live, we have to take risks,” Tessa says. “If you think the life you’re living’s so dangerous, why are you so scared to have a normal one?”
“I’m not afraid of a normal life, for f. . .”
“What do you call this, then?”
Finished with her fruit, Tessa motions at the high-vaulted kitchen, and by implication, the rest of my North Atlantic hideaway sitting like God’s forgotten boom box on the rugged cliff-top.
“Excuse me for saying, but this really isn’t you.”
The temptation to mount a spirited defense might be habitual. For once I deflate and let her words sink in, testing the truth like probing a sore cavity.
“Maybe.”
“Well hallelujah.”
“You’re too young for such cynicism.”
“While you mention it, it’d be great if you remembered my birthday next month,” Tessa says. “I’ll be eighteen.”
“That happened fast,” I say. Pause. “Have you spoken with your mother?”
Tessa’s saved from her answer by an Austrian accent echoing from the entrance below.
* * *
The fashionistas expected death rays or some sophisticated home defense system I really should have. Instead, the androsex guy teeters in on his high heels and the two women follow with jackets and shirts and stuff on hooks, the hardbody blonde of the pair bearing an armful of shoes as well.
Tessa’s having a great time. It only takes me the first thirty minutes to realize it, so after that I ease the stick out of my ass and sort of sink into it like a too-hot bath, letting the three advisors hold up various items against me and my daughter making the bulk of the calls. This is not fun to me. This is not watching baseball, eating a bacon sandwich, resting on my werewolf-skin rug while twin Eskimo girls curate my cock. But I do need clothes, even if I do question if I’m really going to wear a casual burnt scarlet Armani suit, pinstriped licorice Elvira shirt and Morricone loafers any time soon. And yet Tessa’s having fun, I remind myself, and at least for now we’re still at home and not doing this like a pair of freaks out in the real world.
Just as I’m thinking this isn’t so bad after all, we’re done.
“So much for a walk in the park at three,” Tessa says with a huff.
We send off her friends and walk together in the crispening gloom, late summer or early fall outside still, the two of us in communion mounting the dolmen of coastal heath beneath which the mansion rests, inserted in the cliff-face like an old cassette deck in the dashboard of a car. At its crest, we drink in the enormity of ocean stretching far into night’s horizon, nearby habitation sufficiently far away that if it weren’t for the luminescence of the swimming pool beyond the ridge below us, the stars spread-eagled above might burn bright and clear.
“Let’s do lunch tomorrow,” Tessa says.
“Babe, I have to get onto this Annie thing.”
“Are you saying this is all I get out of you until . . . when?”
I halt, uncomfortable at the truth of her words. As remote to me as she’s ever been, there’s no mistaking the brittle crust beneath the carefree and cavalier attitude Tessa hoists between us.
“I have to see Agent Siren and Co.,” I say. “Time for lunch or brunch or elevenses or whatever after that?”
“Dad,” Tessa mocks. “No one says elevenses anymore.”
Then she winks, stepping forward like she might jump off the brink . . . exactly as she plans.
“There were some XXL jeans and I don’t think your feet got any bigger,” she says with a snicker. “Clock tower at eleven?”
“Sure, or I’ll call you.”
“No, just fucking be there, OK?”
“Lol,” I say. “OK.”
* * *
Tessa greets me with a bright smile and the words, “You really don’t have a single civilian friend in the world, do you?”
“Charming,” I say. “Are we ruling out actors?”
“Seriously, you’re friends with any actors, the way you carry on?”
“Listen to little Miss Judgey Pants today.”
I try to weld the retort into a genuine appraisal, conscious of some shadow crossing the face of this undercover Tessa. She sports the sort of (admittedly short, but) curvy physique that would normally mean fighting the dudes off, though admittedly her strength as Windsong . . . and her very public preference for eating peaches . . . saves her the bulk of that, most of the time. For our date she’s wearing ripped Genghis Baldacci jeans, low-cut Dr. Martens, a short striped Derniere tee, and a Zeynep Arcay formal leather trench coat. Her hair’s out, ever her secret vanity, silver lightning-bolt earrings at even greater risk of giving her away to the civilians passing around us.
“I’m surprised you can fly under the radar, undercover like this,” I say.
“We’re not ‘undercover’, dad,” she laughs. “Jeez, we’re civilians. Off-duty people, you dig?”
“I can never tell if you’re imitating me or not.”
“Na, you’re just a bad influence.”
We Lol together at that, moving out from under the shadow of the clock tower awning and into the paved expanse overlooking a miniature lake with fountains, al fresco tables all around, a cloudless noon sky, families taking advantage of the sunshine, kids at a table cheering as a birthday boy gets all the latest Sentinels merchandise any kid could ever want. Spotting my own figurine triggers a squint, a grimace . . . I’m not sure what you’d call it . . . the juxtaposition really bringing it home how I’m effectively no one when I’m not in my Zephyr gear, whether we call that undercover or not.
Or maybe I’m not. Pretty much everywhere we go, women ogle me outright and at least one irritated husband hurries his family away as I follow Tessa to one of the ice-cream vendors, me wearing a faded lavender open-neck Armani business shirt untucked over crisp new jeans and the old motorcycle boots I took to wearing after they ceased being part of my costume. Although the adoration’s for my incognito persona and not Zephyr, the evidence of women making way for me with their eyes . . . hell, even the cheery quips of the old gelato guy . . . only seem to irritate my daughter further, as if her plan’s not working right. I’m hoping it might be a relief when a passing middle-aged harridan hisses at me, “She’s young enough to be your daughter,” but no, the dark set of Tessa’s brow only embleakens her mood.
“She is my daughter,” I say, but to the gelato guy instead.
“Hey bro, no judgement here.”
“More caramel,” I say. “Happy to pay extra.”
We take our creations to stone benches overlooking a miniature village lining the tiny quay where families sail model boats, the dude vaping nearby not part of this commercial, and the detail in the miniaturization of this bucolic Hamptons village life disturbs me when I pause to take in the tortured, quick-painted looks on the faces of the tiny people set throughout the various ankle-high fenced-off sections, commuters on a miniature train platform, grocers unpacking tiny trucks, children marched into a Nineteenth-Century school house seeming to look up at the sky as if at some celestial manifestation of cosmic horror, and I note someone’s culture-jammed the far corner of the village placing yet more figures behind a row of authentic-looking old wooden warehouses and a 50s-style gas station, a half-dozen tiny tattered zombies on the loose mauling a postman and a cab driver, a housewife and her children frozen running from a Buick, my eyes picking up the deliberateness of the woman’s expression, just like the commuters elsewhere on the map upraised as if hoping for some kind of intercession from we Gulliverian onlookers, but instead I let my eyes ghost over the setting mildly unfocused to avoid any further disquiet, unable to avoid noting a trio of Jedi knights waiting on the platform for a train that’s never gonna come.
My daughter’s voice almost makes me jump.
“This doesn’t seem like much of a test to see how you’d get on in the real world,” Tessa says and dabs her tongue disconsonantly at her non-ironically peach sorbet.
“You’re too ripped to fly under the radar,” she sighs. “Life’s easy for beautiful people.”
“That’s such a load of nonsense and you know it.”
“Admit it, dad,” she says. “For a guy, being huge and ripped gets you everything.”
I only laugh and shake my head at the error in her belief that says very little about the real goings-on of the world and everything about her. I try to make eye-level contact as she dips her head again and she knows I’m doing it and at least I win her irritated laugh.
“I really don’t know what you’re so down about,” I say.
Tessa harrumphs, stabbing her treat with a narrow plastic spoon and throwing the whole thing into a nearby trash can not realizing its for recycling.
“This bullshit with the New Sentinels is getting me down,” she says.
Bzzt. The distraction reeks like the red herring it is.
“I thought you’d be pretty stoked about the figurines,” I play along. “Didn’t they just launch today?”
“Jesus Christ, dad,” Tessa snaps. “There’s a lot more to life than figurines, OK?”
“Weren’t you the one just lecturing me about how life doesn’t have to be one epic battle after another?”
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate you adding me to the toy line,” Tessa quickly adds. “You know the royalties will really set me up to do whatever I want in the future, and when the cartoons come out, if the kids actually watch them . . . even more so.”
“Great.”
“It’s just that I’m worried that by the time those guys in the kennels in Korea finish making them . . . I’m not gonna be heading up the team anymore.”
My thoughts flinch back to the hazy recollection of our catch-up at The Flyaway.
“You’re thinking about rolling out with Blackbird and Syzy-whatsit?”
“Hallory’s made a pretty impressive case and wants to handle marketing herself.”
“Jeez, hahaha . . . Is she still even my agent?”
“You should . . . probably talk to her about that.”
Tessa wears an awkward look and my self-deprecating humor shits in my own throat, me gumming the taste and losing interest in my ice-cream as well.
“Great,” I say. “But you know you’re putting the cartoons at risk, babe.”
“The cartoons will be fine, dad.”
I wonder if we should even be talking about this stuff in public, but fuck it. Tessa certainly doesn’t hold back, for all the world just some pissed-off everyday daughter with an unconscionably hot dad.
“Seriously, those guys are really into their fucking cartoons,” I say. “The writers have plans for a whole rollout of the line. Their ideas are way trippier than anything I’ve been through, and that’s really saying something.”
“At least I hope the kids will be able to make better sense of it then.”
“Harsh.”
“The writers do have expansion plans,” Tessa says and cautiously adds, “if the ratings are good.”
She’s got an air of authority that catches me sideways.
“Hallory put that deal together too, remember?”
“Well, yeah,” I say. “Kinda did it while she thought I was killed in action, but . . . yeah.”
“When people thought you were dead all those months, it sparked a lot of public interest in your IP, dad,” Tessa says. “And now . . . my plan with Birdie and Syz is part of it.”
“Meaning?”
“We’re getting our own cartoon too.”
“You’re getting a cartoon and you’re not actually officially a team yet?”
I stand up with unwitting force, frightening families nearby, irked not at my daughter’s good luck, but the ass-backwards way it keeps coming to her.
“Sounds like you’ve got a conversation coming with the Sentinels.”
Tessa nods.
“You should watch your back, dad,” she says. “There’s a few people pretty pissed they didn’t get offered contracts. Smidgeon’s one of them.”
“Fuck that little sawed-off puck in the ass.”
“No thank you.”
We’re still really close to a bunch of rich white people sitting at tables, my profanity cooling the ardor of the nearest couple of dames. Irritated at the lack of privacy this fucking privacy seems to bring, I stalk off between them all and Tessa picks up her goddamned As Worn By Windsong handbag and follows with the restraint of a long-suffering colleague knowing how soon my puff for these charades runs out. She catches me around the back of the main building, a row of tourist buses idling empty nearby near a couple of Mexican tourists smoking e-cigarettes watching a barefoot European college kid in a kaftan busking.
“The park is the opposite way,” Tessa calls.
Something about the parking lot suits me fine. I walk back to her and stand opposite, hands on hips.
“You should hang sunglasses off your shirt,” she says. “That’d be hot.”
“Do you understand why I’m always crapping on at you about thinking maybe you’re not completely wise to some of the dangers in living this life like me?”
“Cartoons don’t kill people, dad.”
“You don’t become a cartoon without becoming a target.”
“What, speaking from personal experience?”
Tessa laughs, once again completely dismissing whatever I’ve said.
“Look at you,” she says. “Even pissed off at me, you look completely at ease. Would this life be so bad?”
“It’s not like you want to be anonymous either, babe.”
My comeback fattens her lip. Tessa’s nose wrinkles and she smiles snidely and spins on her Airwear heel and walks off.
“See dad?” she calls back at me. “No major calamity. No life-and-death struggle. Just a walk in the park. See you next time.”
And I just stand there and let her go.
As I will later come to regret.
-~o~-
Warren Hately is a journalist, cultural theorist and parent coach from Margaret River, Western Australia. Amid many life interests, he writes the ongoing Amazon series Zephyr: a postmodern superhero adventure which started in the early 90s (like George RR Martin’s Wild Cards books) as a Superworld RPG inspired by the world of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.
Please contact for a complimentary review copy of Zephyr I.
Twitter: @wereviking
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Zephyrseries/
Book 1: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C3C4OZU
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Skorned
Scott A. Story
Mr. J. William Medal, Esquire, did not have the look one typically associated with the word “hero.” It was not that he was not handsome, because he was: thick, brunette hair, a strong jaw, and piercing blue-gray eyes confirmed that. He was twenty-eight, upwardly mobile, with powerful arms, and a promising future at the Spire City branch of the law firm of Gray, Gray, and Gris. His office wall was covered in framed certificates and awards, such as Young Lawyer of the Year, the ISBA Laureate Award, the Diversity Leadership Award, and Super Lawyer Awards from 2010, 2011, and 2012.
Will could have looked like a metahero, but for one thing—his wheelchair. Will was a paraplegic. He had lost the use of his legs to a childhood spinal cord injury. His accident had not been anything remarkable or heroic—He did not push a blind man out of the way of a careening truck, nor did he take a bullet intended for someone else. Nothing like that. He merely had fallen into an old well at his Grandfather’s farm, breaking through the rotten wood that covered it and onto the pile of stones that had been used partially to close it up.
Will did not remember much about that day, and he did not dwell on it. His mother had done her best, and if he had a father . . . Well, he had a father, but one that was not around. John William, aka Will, was born out of wedlock, and Medal was his mother’s surname.
Tragedy did not slow Will down. Illegitimate, and “differently-abled,” he h
ad tackled life and taken it on. He had excelled at everything he ever tried, and he had a real talent for law and business. He had been the class salutatorian at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and he had clerked for a judge in the United States Court of Appeals. In his short career, Will already had earned the reputation as the corporate lawyer to watch out for; a real up-and-comer.
Will did not feel like an up-and-comer today. He sat in his small, private office and held a letter in his hand. If anything, he felt terribly conflicted: sad, angry, jealous, lonely, or a potent mix of all these emotions. He had the group secretary, Mrs. Marsh, draw his blinds and close his door. Will took a deep breath and lifted the letter again, reading it for the third time.
“Dear Will:
“You have no doubt heard reports of my death, and that I died in battle with Dr. Horatio Synn.”
True enough. Johnny Saturn’s demise had been featured in the headlines for weeks: John Underhall, mystery man, had given his life to foil the plot of terrorist Dr. Horatio Synn. The news had rocked Will’s world. He had not known his father well, yet the old cop and crime-fighter had been his hero. Johnny Saturn, the street-level avenger, belonged to the city, and now to history, but to Will, this was his biological father. The two of them had had times together and conversations that were just their own. These were memories that were special to Will, a connection that belonged to the two of them and no one else. The world had lost a hero, but Will had lost his personal hero, and that was a huge distinction.
Logically, Will should have resented his father, even hated him for being absent. Logic did not play a large part in this, however.
“Since you are reading this letter, you know that I am not dead. It’s complicated, and I will try to see you as soon as I can. I may not be dead, but I can’t go on, either. I guess you could say that I’m retired. I have Persephone, and she will take good care of me—or kill me, maybe. You never know.”
The Good Fight 4: Homefront Page 20