The officers I saved slowly move around me with all the reverence of lapsed Catholics confronted by the Madonna. It’s only when I look up and notice two are carrying cuffs and the third one a hand-held dart gun that I realize they’re not just here for the sunset.
As Cusp, I’m not quick enough to flee before the dart hits my upraised forearm and I also don’t have Zephyr’s fighter plane constitution to resist the tingling bee-sting sensation rapidly spreading along my arm to my chest.
“. . . the fuck is that?” I manage before paralysis takes my jaw.
“Sorry, honey,” a grimy cop replies, looking genuinely aghast at his churlishness. “White Nine in a can.”
I can only think to myself They do that now? as the rictus takes me in its ravishing grasp completely and I topple sideways and lay frozen as the cops close in to truss me like a Thanksgiving dinner.
So much for gratitude.
Zephyr 21.3 “New Buildings Falling Down”
LIKE SOME HASTILY-conceived found footage flick, I get an incomplete perspective on the post-incident response that is more salvage effort than rescue attempt thanks to my incomprehensible trick with the new buildings falling down.
To put it in context: as Zephyr, about the heaviest thing I’ve ever thrown in a fit of rage is a fully-armed, fully-crewed M1A2 Abrams tank (guys inside didn’t appreciate it much, but fuck ‘em). That chunk of high rise I just rassled weighed at least ten if not twenty times that. I dunno. I suck at math. Common sense alone however dictates this is not something that comes with Cusp’s ill-defined power set and nothing she (or me-in-she) has flagged up till now. And even with the winky aspect of me not exactly having the operating manual on how to access the full range of my hostess’s abilities, I still somehow think Leviathan-level strength falls outside the realm of my disbelief.
I contemplate all this while lying on my side, one eye partially blocked by a chunk of wire-infused debris, paralysis a bodywide phenomenon. I can feel my body – or my borrowed body, perhaps that should be – I just can’t move a frigging muscle. After a few minutes of boots passing close around me, sinister hands grasp Cusp’s ass and the hot, fetid male breath of a moustached chimp in an FBI slicker bears down on me, the smell of breath mints as cloying as the smell of the decaying teeth it is meant to disguise. Under the pretence of patting me down, this asspony slides a wedding ring-encrusted flipper inside Cusp’s ill-advised top and cops a feel of my left breast as I desperately try to send signals to my knee to unleash hell on this guy’s balls. I can’t even shoot daggers at him because my eyes can’t properly focus.
“She’s moving,” another male voice sounds from close by, words fogged by whatever concoction disables me.
“We have to take her in,” the froiteur says, pulling his hand from my top like a cheapskate from his wallet. “That charge should’ve wiped her out.”
“I’ll give her a dose of Serum Twelve,” the first voice says and I see a guy waft into view with a surprisingly febrile afro for a Federal agent, approaching and then kneeling down opposite my face, extracting some kind of pneumatic hypo from a kit.
“This’ll send her to dreamland on the express train,” the newest piece of shit says.
And the moustached gimp leans down to smooth my hair back from my neck, rank smell on my skin like a morning dew from the Abyss.
“Sweet dreams, sugar-pop.”
A new and unique panic floods me, however little effect it has on my shuttered system. I can’t even mewl and roll my eyes as the chill metal tang of the hypo applies to my taut neck and the hiss adumbrates my descent into utter darkness.
So maybe I can understand what some women go through, but I refuse to believe that makes all of us monsters.
*
THE BOY IS climbing. The tree looms over everything, a miniature Yggdrasil in this child’s suburban mythology. The Grandmother Tree, we used to call it, not exactly sure why, there never being anything like a grandmother on the scene when I was a kid.
I’m still watching this robustly-built young boy aged about nine figuring a way up into the crook of this huge willow’s arms, in his blushing, red-cheeked eagerness throwing off the puffer jacket that is his insurance against the cold, eyes casting fervently behind him for the rebuke I know he fears because of course this child is me.
I am still lying on my side watching from the ground as before, though I cannot feel my body at all and I have no sense of my existence save for my undeniable presence, the particles of a January frost further whitening the manky weeds we once called a lawn, the only bright color in the world the flush on this man-boy’s face.
He is beautiful. The fact that he is me is secondary to this revelation as my frozen gaze hones in like that of a falcon, every curve and line of this irascible child’s features in preternatural, crystalline focus, more than just my soul’s connection through time and space able to discern the impious glint to those dark eyes, the tug-of-war between obedience and rebellion activating inert limbs, the sweet good nature that – like some rare and laboratory-grown flower – cannot possibly survive in this cruel world’s unprotected greenhouse for long.
A deep and uncomfortable sorrow floods through me, along with the estrogen pangs of my woman’s body in seeing this perfect child caught amid the hoary breath-falls of a winter’s morning expunged from my consciousness like an artefact of a thousand years ago, as rare as the buried coins of some Anglo-Saxon king forgotten to an industrial marshland.
The boy-I-was hooks his scuffed Ked into the tree-fork and hauls himself up, one eager, damned near maniacal look back past me at the house
I know is no longer there; and then, like a modern day Ratatosk, he scurries up the tree and into the naked upper branches, neck untroubled as he gazes skywards to where the sun should be, the sky just a whitish frieze as blank as many of my other memories as well as my sense of how I am here and why this is even happening.
“Joseph!”
The voice startles me. Though disembodied, I have no reaction except to come back into presence with snap, aware I could drift away in a moment’s thoughtfulness that would become thoughtlessness as easily as one of this boy’s pluming breaths simply dematerializing into the scenery.
My mother’s legs come into view: black leggings ending in eight-hole Doc Martens in a fashionably abstruse alligator print. Her back is to me, and just as much as my heart caves in with the deep and unmanageable longing to see the child I once was more closely, I also yearn for Maxine to turn around as if I might resurrect her with this gaze of perverse memory. Yet she remains resolutely the wrong way around, the set of her shoulders more stolid than I recall, the svelte figure of her crime-fighting days as Catchfire long since sacrificed to middle age.
If I could give my words voice, I would, urging her to turn, to see me, to conjure me into life through bearing witness, but there is no tongue for me to speak, no voice to summon. I am a ghost, disembodied, and I can only watch with sadness and regret as the spark in the young me’s face slips away at the summons of the woman who delivered him into this world. Reluctantly, young Joseph descends a few branches, dropping to the ground dusting bark from his palms, the nascent charmingly sheepish look I will hone to perfection in later years having none of the designed effect on our clearly irate mother.
I want to tell her not to be angry. If this is a memory, I have no memory of what. This is no special day. This is no crucial landmark unit of my past in which clues to the unfolding present can be found. There is only her and the boy I was, locked into this ideational matrix perhaps forever in this moment – a moment I wish each could cherish more than they obviously do.
The boy is perfect. There is no weight of the world on him yet. No powers. No knowledge. Not a touch of cruelty. Whatever imperfections of mine the world has sharpened in the years since, they are not here in this instant, and I can only pine, not just for the body lost to me, but the prehistoricity of youth, the cliché of innocence, the myth of freedom into which this childho
od tangle has passed.
And for Maxine, here she is the mother whom I helped burn to a crisp despite her own powers, who sheltered me against the world and hid me from forces she barely understood and about which she communicated so little before her death.
Now the boy marches to the gas chamber of her motherly arms, head down as she quietly scolds him with words I can barely hear, wanting him to be safe, to stay warm, not to take so many risks. She cannot understand the fire within him, and not just because it is male energy, though yeah, also there is that. There is a gulf that separates them in that moment that is an inversion of my unrealized wish for them to commune with this sliver of our continuum. And the paucity – and palpability – of that moment would take my breath away if I had any to give or take.
“Come inside,” Max says, one woolen arm directing the boy to go before her. “There’s someone who wants to see you.”
Somehow my perspective shifts, turning, concertina-ing, a prismatic collapse of light rays as I invert and follow, now seeing their backs again so I never see my true mother’s face, like she might just be an actor with an uncanny disguise on this found footage moment as she ushers the young me back to the house, and the back door is ajar despite the chill day, thick bronzed leaves cover the ground, my old black Mongoose rests against the weather-board planks, and the sound of a kettle whistling comes from within, the warmth beyond the entry almost visible in a heightening of the colors, the tension as a man’s shape moves from one side of the shadowed doorway to the next and the slant of those narrow features is unmistakable and – even as I plunge into the horror of these implications – my mind races to understand what it means that this scene, if it is true, is locked in my unconscious and only able to boil forth now, as if Siren’s telepathic intrusions wriggled something free.
Joseph approaches the doorway and the vision starts to fade. I cling to it like a drowning man to a life buoy, desperately fighting the darkness that encroaches the edges as Maxine raises her arm again to indicate the man beyond the threshold.
“Joseph,” Maxine lilts in her Derry brogue. “Say hello to your Uncle John.”
And the only worse thing that could happen at that moment happens as Lennon’s features emerge from the shadows like a medieval bas relief, and the scraggly hair framing that hawkish nose lifts, looking up and past the boy doing his best to offer the stranger his hand.
The Doomsday Man’s eyes bore into mine and then I fade and it all goes away.
Zephyr 21.4 “The Present Moment”
THE NOISE OF the holding cells filters through my sleep until I wake at the throbbing pain at my wrists, a lifetime’s habits as Joseph drooling in my sleep not going anywhere despite the switcheroo as I sit up and try to dry my face with numb wrists, startled by the pain of the heavy titanium manacles trapping my hands in bondage.
The echoes of my dream or vision or memory or fantasy or whatever it is resonate through me, aided and abetted by my disorientation as I look at my surroundings and blink and narrow my lashes at the sodium glare of lighting at one and the same time overwhelming yet strangely atmospheric. It takes a few seconds to absorb that the front of my cell is just a Perspex screen or something like it, keeping to the best tradition of serial killer prisons everywhere, and opposite me, beyond a 1960s-era hospital-looking corridor, sits an identical see-through window with a number more stretching off in either direction. In the cell opposite stand two figures: the sinuous and sexy midnight-blue leather-clad figure of my one-time consort, the winged Night Angel, and a stocky-looking black guy in what appears to be rubber lederhosen, the outfit not so much a costume, but as I discern later, the under-suit for his confiscated powered armor. This looks like a unisex operation. Lounging as rebelliously as total confinement in the other cells allows is Demonizer, Mr Magnetic, Farseer, and Sun Man. I don’t know what’s being used to suppress their powers – or mine, for that matter – but as I reach inside myself to see what’s my option, there’s a bizarre numbness that feels like more than just the after-effects of the hypo.
Faint banging brings my head up as I see Night Angel looking like a three-dollar hooker slamming her hand on the glass screen to get my attention, insouciant swagger to those narrow, unmoving hips. She starts yelling something at me, actually chewing gum at the same time that I notice her black wings slowly undulating between half-open and closed. After a few monotone yet smothered syllables I wave my hands back to stop her.
“I can’t hear a fucking word you’re saying,” I shout.
“Wha–?”
“I can’t hear you,” I say and throw my hands up.
Not knowing who I really am, Night Angel gives a petulant sigh and extracts her gum and squishes it into the middle of the screen and flounces back to her bench, the eye contact between her and her cell-mate showing they’re not exactly best buds. I might say or even think more at this stage except two well-dressed agents sweep in from beyond my field of vision and step through a hitherto unseen panel in the screen that hisses open.
Annie Black and Heracleon.
“Since when were you working for the Feebs?” I ask the former (new) Sentinel.
Heracleon still wears the headband despite the Armani duds and his brow furrows beneath the jewelry as he eyes me up and down as if seeing me for the first time.
“Excuse me? I didn’t know we’d met,” he says, and of course technically he’s correct.
I snap my mouth shut, trying not to let Cusp’s lip tremble as I switch my gaze to Miss Black, trying for sympathetic and instead coming up with something closer to irritated. A mime I ain’t.
“Name?” Annie barks at me.
“Excuse me?”
“Your name,” she says archly. “We don’t have you on file. Are you registered?”
“I think I might plead the fifth on this,” I tell her, then thumb-motion at her offsider. “Can’t he tell you who I am? He’s a pre-cog, right?”
“I’ve explained this a million times,” Heracleon says. “It’s cosmic awareness, not fortune-telling, OK?”
I shrug. Annie checks me over once more looking mystified.
“Have we met before?” she asks. “You know, apart from the other day?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Nice of you to turn on your own people in a crisis – those of us who haven’t rolled over already,” I add, eyes back to Heracleon.
“We’ve deputized a number of registered parahumans as part of the crisis response,” Miss Black says sans excuse. “Likewise, we’ve had to press these old holding cells into service, so . . . apologies if the facilities aren’t to your liking.”
The last line is pure snark and we both know it. I give her a look and she gives me a look and frankly we could cat-fight then and there, except Heracleon clears his throat as if he really can see that coming, which brings us back to the present moment.
“So, are you gonna tell us who you are?” Annie asks.
“Cusp.”
“Right. Good. And do you consent for us to –”
“Listen,” I interrupt. “Why the hell are you rounding up all these masks? If the city is in crisis, don’t you think you’ll need every –”
“We have orders,” Annie says.
“From who?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t answer to you,” she says. “Our orders are from the top.”
“Who at the top?”
“I don’t think you’re hearing me.”
“I don’t think you’re hearing me.”
Annie harrumphs and somehow produces an iPad she thrusts towards me with some kind of official-looking document enlarged.
“We just need your thumb print here,” she says.
“Thumb print? I don’t think so,” I say. “What’s it for?”
But Annie’s malicious smile turns into a feral sneer as she nods sideways to her partner.
“That’s a refusal,” she says. “Discretionary powers authorized.”
“‘Discretionary powers’? What the f–?”
&nb
sp; Heracleon gives me his best sad face.
“You really should have complied . . . but I knew you wouldn’t.”
“You don’t know shit, you turkey,” I snap.
They take me by the upper arms and move me out into the corridor and I wouldn’t think twice about fighting them off except I feel as weak as a newborn lamb – that, plus the eight-man brick of heavily-armed SWAT guys waiting for us outside.
*
WITH ESCORT IN tow, the agents frog-march me down the corridor and into an industrial lift. All the while I berate Annie Black with questions and imprecations saying maybe she should be examining her “orders” a little more closely. Agent Black shrugs me off with that officious confidence common to bureaucrats everywhere and members of the Waffen-SS. As they propel me into another large cell, the ceiling festooned with sophisticated equipment, I can’t help feeling like the façade of this panopticon is starting to crack.
“Agent Taurus will oversee the examination,” Annie says and she and Heracleon scarper.
“Taurus?”
My first thought is fuck. This is a guy capable of the subtlety you’d expect from a guy with hooves for feet. Or trotters. Or whatever it is you call bull’s feet. And of course, just when I’m thinking this can’t get any worse, Taurus pushes through the doorway with a black-clad figure in tow who makes my stomach heave.
Me.
Zephyr 21.5 “Apocalypse”
MY OWN SMUGLY-grinning face stares back at me as my bodyjacker Matrioshka sidles behind Taurus’s broad-shouldered girth, shooting me looks that are the absolute antidote to any fondness I might have once held for myself. Me, or I should say Belle, practically dances from tiptoe to tiptoe in the ecstasy of the moment, so many layers of dramatic irony in play that I can’t tell if this is a masterpiece of cosmic proportions or some kind of trigger for the apocalypse.
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