Zephyr VI

by Warren Hately

  Portal knows that I know and I know he knows and it’s just fucking awkward, not to mention ridiculous in the grand, star-spangled enormity of everything else that has occurred. Just as I think I might say something, he breaks off and clutches his face and generally resumes his own freak-out, which I’m soon to discover comes with its very own director’s commentary. I guess this is really going to be the defining moment for whichever selfie-addict ends up playing Portal in the movie, so I try to give the guy his due here. If you ever wondered what the difference is between a monologue and a soliloquy, the latter ‘s when none of the other characters in the scene give a shit what the guy’s saying.

  “I thought I was dead,” Portal says and swivels back to me, gasping through the mask of his own fingers clutching his face. “I thought they had me. They did have me. I brought them here. But I mean, these aren’t people, you know? The Things I know are out there, you know, I’ve seen them in the flickers, out there beyond time and space. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’ve seen them in the curtains I make. Past the green fire. I thought maybe we came to Their attention, you know? Once people started shifting through time and space and shit, I thought maybe They got curious about us. Maybe They came through somehow? Like maybe it was, some of it, my fault? And this was my Karma. I thought I was going to die, or worse, become one of Their servants, just like Darkstorm and the others. Jesus Christ, Cusp. Darkstorm was my friend. We started out the same year. Holy shit, Cusp. Holy shit. Is he gone? Are the others gone? So where did They go, if they were in them?”

  It’s a chilling contemplation, but there’s no way that speech isn’t getting cut in rewrites.

  “We don’t have time for this shit now,” I tell Portal.

  I motion to him to follow and Portal nods weakly and trails alongside me as I trudge back to Seeker now reassembling her cybernetic body armor into a more discreet state. Stealth mode.

  “We need to move right now, before anything else goes wrong,” I tell her.

  Loren nods. “OK.”

  “Where’s Baroness?”

  Seeker understands the scope of what I’m talking about here. Mustering herself, she turns to Portal, soothingly, hands raised like the wife she could’ve been in another life, hating herself, trapped delivering instructions to a moron husband.

  “Manchester,” she says. “Do you know it?”

  “Roughly,” Portal says.

  “Roughly will do,” I snap. “Let’s go. Get the others.”

  “You’re quite the general, Joe,” Loren smirks wearily at me.

  I’m not even going to waste time explaining the renewed vigor in my pose. There’s nothing about excellence or leadership driving me except rabid self-interest. With certainty borne of a lifetime’s experience, I know we’re in no way clear of the woods yet.

  And at precisely this juncture, Enigma huffs up on cue with a depleted look on his dark-featured face.

  “The big white guy’s gone,” he says.

  “Absolom?”

  “Was that who it is?” Enigma replies.

  I squint at his grammar, and before I can say more, Sentinel and Mistress Snow join us. The veteran’s brawny chest is on full display thanks to the costume malfunction. Oh, and Sentinel’s practically topless too.

  “What about all these people?” Mistress Snow asks above what I squintingly hope isn’t liver-spotted cleavage.

  “We have to go,” I say. “There’s something behind this apocalypse. Someone. If we turn it off at the source, we have to believe there’s a chance of getting things back on track.”

  “You believe that, Joe?” Seeker says.

  “Why do you call her Jo?” Enigma asks.

  I dismiss his question with a wave, which only draws attention to my grievous wound. Seeker recoils in concern and other eyes go large.

  “Cusp, you look like you’re still bleeding,” Snow says.

  “It’s . . . bad. I agree,” I say with a strange bafflement I’m not used to ascribing to blood loss. “I’m not used to . . . this kind of injury.”

  “You need medical care,” Seeker says firmly. “I can help, but this technology is still so new to me. It keeps . . . slipping away from me.”

  I shoot her a bleary look and shake my head, lank green hair like that of a dead Medusa.

  “First, let’s go. We have to go. I can feel it,” I say with clear pronunciation so no one else misunderstands and because I am too weary to repeat myself.

  In fact, I feel myself starting to slip under the brim of consciousness and snap awake like a heroin freak on a couch at a party, and in that wild gesticulation of my one good arm, I grab Portal and squeeze his shoulder.

  “Manchester. Now.”

  He takes a moment. Another little character arc ticked off. Then he nods and barely changes expression before his hidden clench summons another of his flickering green namesakes.

  I step through the curtain self-conscious about the moment’s interstitial shift between-worlds and then I am out in early English morning light, the dappled quality of the scene even gentler than the ash-colored skies of my home city.

  Stumbling with my weakness, I look back awaiting the others. Instead, a hideous, high-pitched shriek and then a man’s loud bellow pierce the veil of the spectral green portal and then the whole ragged curtain collapses in on itself leaving me completely stranded and alone.

  Zephyr 22.7 “Between Here And Oblivion”

  I AM OUT of the furnace of old New York, and that is good news. But it’s kinda hard to overlook possibly bleeding to death in the wrong body in full tattered superhero regalia alone in the middle of an English field.

  The field, however, turns out to be bordered by some provincial-looking stone walls which part to reveal a genteel laneway, that beautiful golden light untrammeled by disaster shining now in syrupy bands like a foreign life-force derived primordially of the sun and choosing only now to make its first explorations of our world. I’m distracted by the sight, such beauty falling on the early budding leaves of trees lining the cobble-paved road that it’s like a movie moment, except when it isn’t. A back-firing old MG sedan chugs out the laneway exit with its lights still on from a night just recently departed. Myself, I’m doubled over a few dozen yards from the wending road-side I can now acknowledge beyond the overlong winter grass spiking alien and barren all about me as I clutch my red arm with the posture of someone experiencing fatal diarrhea, conscious now of a nasty burn also stiffening the flesh of my cut left leg.

  “Stop,” I croak and limp-vault towards the faded red car as it veers to take the bend onto the road around what I now realize is the outermost fringes of the English city of Manchester.

  Against my luck, the car bleeds off like some red-breasted sparrow startled from the gentility of that morning (the morning now sundered by the car’s own exhaust, I might add). And I’m left hunched on the roadside with an aggrieved-at-the-world expression besmirching this once gorgeous face.

  “Fuck,” I say not as loudly as I wish. “I don’t even know where Baroness is.”

  My breath steams in the freezing air, joining with the fog that reminds me of so long ago and for the first time perhaps since I entered this woman’s body, I think about Elisabeth and try to reconcile where we are at now and what happened to the girl who used to catch the first bus to crawl into my bed on those cold winter mornings of yesteryear so long ago. I am exhausted and sore and barren and possibly bleeding to death, but in that one fractured moment I wish fervently that everything happening now was just some mental blossom that would burst and take me back to how things once used to be, however miserable it seemed I was half those times.

  Suffice to say, nothing of the sort happens. The morning groans on like an old man with an ass full of congenital herpes and I drag myself walking up the laneway so recently emptied, moving along side streets dominated by aging walls concealing secluded, quasi-rural homes amid patches of aging industry, old warehouses, horse yards, stables, Citroën mechanics, work
shops, defunct businesses, a tile gallery, an antique glass studio, a Wiccan retreat, the Church of the One and Only Lord Our Savior Jesus Christ Nyarlathotep (honest, this is what the sign reads, though the church looks long disused and perhaps the Crawling Chaos doesn’t have the most active congregation in these parts, apart from the graffiti artists), as well as sundry other homes, luxurious and not-so luxurious nestled in the rural glamour of the huge city’s tranquil outskirts and reclaimed agri-industrial nostalgia.

  Thoughts of my former wife – I genuinely cannot tell you at this moment if we are still legally married or divorced – continue to churn like wind-borne trash through the deserted carnival of my mind, and I wonder how I can get to Beth’s house before running out of mojo entirely.

  And then everything changes.

  *

  “CAN I HELP you there?” a girl’s English-accented voice rings out.

  I am stumbling and bleary at this stage, like your average shitty marathon runner who is just another ordinary wage slave biting off a lot more than she can chew in an office job dominated by reading magazines and blogs and trawling Facebook to eyeball ex-boyfriends and crushes. I glimpse a skinny girl in a weird quilted jacket and a faded pink beret with a pom-pom on top, a stained and equally faded scarf disguising her throat. Collar-length tufts of walnut-colored hair frame pallid features, big eyes watching me with a mixture of fear and understanding from the lee of a half-collapsed wall.

  “Are you hurt?” the girl calls. “Are you one of them? Which one are you? I’m sorry, I’m never very good with names.”

  The girl advances cautiously across the street to where I sag against a dusty Citroën, her unnaturally big eyes the color of black marbles and something strange as well about the luminosity around her face.

  That’s about all I take in for now. Gibbering God-knows-what, I crumple down the side of the car and into the damp street upon a bed of water-logged newspapers and note the escaping air from my burning lungs like angels’ wings and poorly-developed photographs of ephemeral landscapes that evaporate into the blurry behind.

  Indeed, the fog comes and goes for a while. Not days, or I fucking hope not, but certainly I’m away with the pixies on a magic cloud for a good day and a night and at some point I sit up to puke all down the side of the bed I’m on and then I lever onto the floor, staggering into a fall that takes me to my target: a battened window on the far side of a small yellowish carpeted room.

  The latches evade my drugged grasp for a moment, and then I crank open one of those windows of the type we don’t see very much in Atlantic City, since so much of our old housing stock was destroyed in ’84.

  The night breeze awakens me from my stupor, however briefly.

  England. I drink in its foreign smell of dust and ageless decay and faded opulence and the fetishism of Empire and think about Atlantic City halfway to ruin on the other side of the ocean and then just shake my head as much to dismiss my inertia as those gloomy thoughts.

  The door cracks open behind me and the young girl appears, nearly identical as before except now she wears a white woolen hat, also garnished with a pom-pom. I am conscious at once of the light brightening in the room.

  “You have powers?” I ask in Cusp’s disused, croaky voice.

  Like some Dickensian caricature, the big-eyed girl only looks meekly back at me.

  “You were talking before, so what happened?” I say to her. “You’re not afraid of me, I hope?”

  I try to inject a little warmth into my delivery despite my drowsiness. By my own lazy gesture I note my injury seemingly gone.

  “Mona healed you,” the girl says.

  “Mona?”

  “We’re the same,” the girl says. “My name is Rose.”

  A shadow fills the doorway behind her and I see a woman’s figure shrouded in bandages as tightly as any Egyptian mummy you might pay money to see. Careworn crinkles framing dull grey-blue eyes are the only discernible feature I can see as she moves silently behind the young English girl and lays one cloth-wrapped hand on Rose’s shoulder.

  I nod. It all makes sense. A glowing girl and a gauze-clad healer.

  Mutants.

  *

  I HAVE TO sit on the bed again, and Rose kindly guides me by the elbow even though she can’t be older than ten or eleven. She tucks the scraggly, ill-kempt hair from my face as I inadvertently go the downwards-facing dog, nearly succumbing to nausea before I clutch the edge of the bed and lever myself in.

  “You were badly injured,” Rose says in her strangely careful way. “You will still need rest.”

  “I don’t have time to rest,” I tell her. “How long was I out?”

  “Mona had to sing for a day and a night until you were well,” Rose says. “That was nearly a day ago.”

  “You gave me medicine?”

  “We ransacked the shops,” Rose says with a shrug. “It’s easy.”

  My eyes would bulge out of their sockets if I wasn’t so exhausted. It hadn’t occurred to me Atlantic City’s contagion could spread overseas.

  “What’s . . . I mean, how are things in England?”

  “Would you like to watch telly?”

  “Telly?” I repeat dumbly. “You have television?”

  Rose cracks a giggle – the first I’ve seen. It’s strangely reassuring despite the gnawing feeling of wrongness in residence beneath my ovaries.

  The girl gestures to the room and for some reason, only now do I register the naked glowing bulb hanging from the many-times-painted roof.

  “We have electricity,” Rose says. “Britain is under martial law. That’s the word they use anyway. Lots of people ran away to Scotland. And to Wales.”

  “I can’t imagine the Scots are too happy about that.”

  Rose doesn’t get my adult tone and for the first time in a while I decide it can probably slide.

  “You still have government? Police?” I ask her.

  “The city’s full of rioters and looters, but we have law and order,” Rose says. “Moaner and me took up here once we saw so many places left empty. We was living in the canals with the others before movin’ up here.”

  The little girl immediately fixes me with a look, cutting short any extended inquiries. All I really want to know is about Atlantic City and if anyone’s figured out what the fuck has happened and how the hell I was healed, but instead I am ground zero as Rose’s light bulb effect peaks and diminishes with her sudden show of emotion.

  “What are you doing here in England?” she asks.

  I stop. Pause. Stare.

  “How old are you?”

  “Answer my question,” she says with a gentle nervous whine.

  “No. You answer mine.”

  “I’m twelve. Nearly thirteen.”

  “What?”

  “I have boobs and everything,” she says and starts like she’s going to show me.

  My hands come up faster than that time I had to catch the head of Miracle Man’s robot double or we were all going to get nuked. The only fate worse than death at this moment is the prospect of unwittingly getting branded a pedophile once a UN Truth and Reconciliation Committee sorts all this mess out retrospectively.

  “Keep your shirt on, Sally,” I say. “You’re a mutant, huh?”

  She adopts a sullen look and says nothing. We are at an impasse. I am still weak as a lamb and there is a surreal quality to the light, the passage of the seconds, the sound of my own voice, the telltale traces of dust in the air, the weird alien smell of this ancient city oozing from every particle.

  Soothingly, I ask her, “Tell me about Atlantic City.”

  “Tell us why you’re here, first,” Rose says. “We took a risk for you.”

  “Fine. I’m here hunting someone called the Baroness. You might even know who she is or where I can find her?”

  Rose crinkles her nose and looks at me like I’m retarded.

  “It’s a big city and I can’t know everyone,” she answers. “Do I look like I’m normally dini
n’ with royalty? Who’s this Baroness and what’s she done? You never told me your name.”

  “It’s . . . Cusp,” I say.

  “Is it? You don’t sound very sure.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You’re not making things up just to get your way, are you?” Rose says and I immediately sense her genuine fear as she and the bandage-wrapped and apparently unspeaking Mona ease back towards the door despite my bed-wrecked state.

  “It’s just a long story and I am tired. I don’t know much about Baroness. I need to find her. Speak with her.”

  “Why?”

  I shake my head as I lay down fully.

  “Later,” I say.

  The muffledness of unconsciousness nearly overwhelms me, but God damn I am an American and right now I would very much like to watch some TV.

  I maybe even say as much, somewhere between here and oblivion.

  *

  MUSIC, ON AN elfin breeze. Bizarre and sincere and theatrical. I lie half-asleep and only listen.

  How I needed you

  How I grieve now you’re gone

  In my dreams I see you

  I awake so alone

  I know you didn’t want to leave

  Your heart yearned to stay

  But the strength I always loved in you finally gave way

  Somehow I knew you would leave me this way

  Somehow I knew you could never, never stay

  And in the early morning light

  After a silent, peaceful night

  You took my heart away and my being

  The music cavorts on, but I sit up to more closely examine the little girl sitting with her back to me, illuminated by the lamp her body shields as she kneels adjusting a turntable on a low sideboard.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  “English band,” Rose says.

  “I don’t think we get English music where I’m from,” I tell her almost as sincerely as the lyrics in that song, though probably it is equally a nonsense.