Zephyr II

by Warren Hately

  He pushes the wheel and rolls over to the drinks buffet, slamming into the damned thing and nearly knocking a glass loose. Instead, he takes it and pours a healthy slug of whiskey. I nod and he repeats the ritual and I move across and take the drink.

  “Merci,” I say more than a little self-consciously.

  “Ooh, pas de problème, mon cher. Vous-parlez, un peu?”

  I look at him and he looks at me, eager, expectant. We really are going to do this thing. Fuck.

  “Um, j’ai étudais a l’école.”

  “Etudié? Oui?” he corrects me with a smile.

  My mind goes blank. I feel sweat beading at the small of my back, my nape.

  “You said you should consider yourself lucky, Julian,” I blurt. “Why is that?”

  “Because I escaped to live, my friend. I am sure some of his other progeny were not so fortunate.”

  There is a curl to his lips when he speaks that even I can’t help but notice, an acknowledgement there are others of us out there. Inferiors. Saboteurs. Or were we?

  “Other . . . progeny?”

  “You want to know where my father is? Well, I cannot say. I do not know. However, I do not think you will find him on his island. Not any more.”

  “His island . . . You mean Jersey?”

  I had practically flown over it on the way here.

  “Jersey?” Zherzhie? “No, this is of the ancient past, Zephyr. I am speaking of Kra-ka-to-a, though of course in my father’s case, Krakatoa is the island he blew up, not the one that simply blew up by itself.”

  “Where is the island?”

  “It’s where he kept all my poor bastard siblings and the women,” Julian says with an understandable whiff of distaste, though I can’t explain the curious accent with which he declaims it. “Perhaps if you go there, you will find the answers you seek.”

  He looks down now with an air of defeat. It manifests in every line of his strange face, which I guess is a curious mirror to my own, yet less so. And most obvious in his dejection is the fact he does not even ask why I want to know.

  I look down at my brother and can see the mask conceals me even from him. And perhaps this is not a bad thing.

  As he begins to weep, Julian explains how John Lennon appeared to him eight or nine years previously, simply manifesting in the air with his hands bathed in colored lights. He demanded Julian demonstrate his powers, to call forth the abilities his father’s genetic legacy ensured.

  Except Julian had none. The Doomsday Man did not believe him or either could not bring himself to do so. He pelted the young man with attacks, finally blasting his legs until they were just withered stumps. His powers were biological in nature, somehow, yet created a lightshow big enough to call down two tactical response squads from the Manchester Police and a flying squad of Union Jacks. By the time they came, Lennon was gone and his son was in a coma. After he recovered, he abandoned the music career that had made him a considerable sum, investing in the Norman castle and its extensive security apparatus. Julian had believed his father was returned until he saw me with his own eyes.

  “I guess having a flying man land in your driveway is a jolt to your nerves, after all that has happened,” I say soothingly, sipping from my second glass.

  My host smiles the gentle post-trauma smile of one made sleepy by tears’ catharsis. And he shakes his head.

  “No, Zephyr. I have close friendships with Hyperman (Eeperman) and La Belle Noir, heroes in this country, and also Shade is well known to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Superhuman visitors are not new to me. I expected my father because the defense system is designed to react to his unique biological signature – a signature you very closely possess, mon frère.”

  Julian smiles tiredly as he looks up at me. “My brother.”

  Zephyr 4.14 “The Sheer Particles of Time”

  WE TALK THEN into the night. I fancy, even as the top shelf liquor floats his tongue, that some of that weird-ass accent slips away. Mostly it is him doing the talking and I listen, rapt, as his recollections of an ordinary life put more flesh on the picture of my father and the childhood I never knew than anything my two mothers combined have ever said.

  Julian doesn’t ask much of me. He doesn’t want to know “which one of zem” my mother was. He has a hole where his heart should be and everything from the withered legs – he shows them to me, in a moment more intimate than repulsive; they look like they belong to a palsied eight-year-old – right through to his astonishingly overdone French accent are a reflection of the abuse and indifference heaped on him by our father. I cannot explain the thousand-and-one odd mannerisms he has adopted to cope and I do not bring myself to ask about the Francophilia.

  As he puts it, he was the first of them. A child of Lennon’s brief marriage during his Preacher Man phase. A marriage purportedly snuffed out by the other members of the team who felt such physical connections would hold back their pursuit of Enlightenment – the pursuit of Godhood as superhumans.

  “That is where it all started. In India,” Julian said. “It is not just coincidence that Hitler took his swastika from them. People would have you believe it was that Japanese demoness who began him on the path to madness, but really it was the other ones. After their time with the holy men, eating opium and meditating and starving themselves in their ashrams, it was the Beatles themselves who began on the path to what I guess you would call a new kind of eugenics.”

  He spent time on the island in the early years because Lennon believed his son would carry dormant meta-genes even though his mother was a “normal” woman. (He says it like a curse word). She died in a car crash, conveniently leaving young Julian in John’s care, though now Julian hints he has evidence to suggest the crash was caused by McCartney – “Witnesses said there was a flash of red light before the car went off the road,” Julian whispers, eyes huge and dreadful with the recollection, and in that moment showing me the child he once was – and in those early years the boy was like a young prince among his father’s consorts.

  I try to console him, but I don’t really pull it off. I guess I’m pretty new to this brother thing.

  “I can’t imagine what it was like for you,” I say.

  “Why not?” he chuckles, wiping away the tears. “You were there.”

  “No,” I reply softly, almost guilty at the confession. “My mother went into hiding when John came for me. I was four or five at the time.”

  Julian frowns. “This year is . . . what?”

  I tell him my best guess and his frown deepens, losing the comedic edge.

  “My friend, I am ten years older than you?”

  I nod. “If you say so.”

  “We went to the island when I was seven,” he replies. “We went with the first five women, before there were any babies. Only one of them, er, Titanium Girl, was pregnant.”

  “Titanium Girl was on the island?” I ask.

  There’s a bad feeling in my stomach, kinda like a colony of spiders trying to push their way up my esophagus.

  “She carried one of his children?”

  “Two,” Julian replied. “Though when she escaped, she had to leave the girl behind. She took Jimmy with her. And Catchfire, of course.”

  “Catchfire,” I repeat.

  Julian meets my gaze, but he’s too damned inward-looking to see the spots before my vision through the eye-holes of my mask.

  “Yes. Titanium Girl with her little boy and Catchfire with her son, too. Joseph.”

  “Well fuck me.”

  Julian doesn’t noticeably hear. His eyes are trained on a memory made rare and insubstantial by adulthood as the taste of cotton candy or the fear of the dark.

  “They were among the first true believers, the ones who agreed to start the Colony,” Julian says. “It was only later – I think, perhaps like any man with a harem, my father grew greedy and neglected the ones who had served him best. He scoured down more women with the right genes, who evidenced powers. And they
bore him children until the island was bulging with them.”

  “And he . . . blew up this island, you said?”

  “Yes. Around the time he tracked me down,” Julian says and sniffs.

  “I need to go there.”

  “D’accord.” He snorts again, thumbs mucus away from his nose and adds very casually, “If you have some sort of data device or GPS, I can download the location and some maps I have drawn from recollections.”

  I nod and stand, sobriety fuelled by a chill anger thumping through my veins. Half a bottle of the stuff isn’t going to put a dent in me, though the same can’t be said for my host. He steers clumsily across the room and we go through a doorway. It leads to a hall and on into the observatory beyond. There are rows of computers in there and he goes to one of them even as I pause inside the door to stare up and marvel at the sheer expense of the set-up.

  “This is my sanctum,” Julian says as he butts into the first of the PCs and places down the GPS and my phone I have given him.

  “It is my only salve, after what my father did, to consider how small we are in the cosmos of space, how little our lives matter when we remain trapped to this ball of spinning earth.”

  He says all this with the splutter of his heavy French accent returned.

  He taps and clicks a moment and then connects up the devices. After a few moments more, Julian stops and turns.

  “You have trusted me with your secret, brother,” he says. “Now I shall trust you with mine.”

  He has the sort of little smile I don’t normally like on men like him. After another moment of fiddling, he scoots the wheelchair across the walkway and over to another row of instruments. There’s all sorts of crap over there, so I barely notice when he reaches up and pulls down a big space age-looking helmet with cables snaking from the top and back. He puts the gizmo on and promptly goes nigh-nighs.

  A black-curtained doorway on the far side of the chamber bursts open and an armored figure in a crimson red cloak strides through with none of the difficulties you’d expect of a man with the legs of stillborn, if I am making the right connection here. It only takes a second or two for recognition to set in as the silver-and-red form pulls the hood up over his helmeted head.

  “Bloody hell,” I remark. “You’re the Crimson Cowl.”

  “That is correct,” Julian replies in the familiar machine voice the world has come to know and often fear. There’s none of the French effete whatsoever.

  “When you find our father, you must let me know,” the sinister automaton says. “He and I have a score that must be settled.”

  *

  I GET THE fuck out of Normandy without much further ado, politely accepting my topped up phone and GPS from the, how do you say, homicidal maniac in the robot body, before getting the hell out of Brooklyn with my ass intact. The Crimson Cowl and I have tussled on several occasions and last time we met, I ended up flogging him with his own severed arm. He escaped – like he always escapes, or else returns at a later date even after Chamber has twisted his head off or Mister Magnetic has turned him into a living Moebius strip – and now I understand finally how he does it. The face is like a fencer’s mask, a hard crease down the middle of the black grille, flat featurelessness on either side. The voice is likewise artificial, threatening in the way only a piece of fiction can be.

  I recall the rumors too about a “good” Crimson Cowl. He even showed up when the Iceman Cometh the previous month, though I was too busy to notice exactly what was going on. I can’t reconcile the two different visions of the famous nemesis and after realizing I’ve spent the night kicking back with my older brother who is far more fucked up and delusional than even I knew, I can’t say I’ll be in a hurry to get back and report in to him.

  I may need Sting and St George’s help after all, though this seems a little at odds with launching my own new revitalized super team in just three days’ time.

  I am hot to get to Doomsday Island now, except I am missing a night’s sleep and my hyped-up constitution has been snacking on nothing but single malt since about twelve hours ago. The sun is up when I leave Chez Madhouse and there’s not much option but to wing it for home. I’ve learnt my lesson flying off unprepared from Twilight’s Grand Turkey Roast, and I’m not about to repeat that mistake without a very good reason.

  Thinking about the lies my mothers have told me, I know the Island isn’t my first priority anyway. I’ve got other fish to fry first.

  I rocket in a lazy arc into the stratosphere and let planetary spin ease the journey home. I am not a big fan of the thinning atmosphere, but my limbs ache as it is, and when I begin the descent, I feel giddy and solemn as my plunge takes me back into a world consumed by darkness which feels now like a mirror to all the bad shit accumulating like nicotine to the lungs of my soul.

  Getting to the bottom of my family history is starting to look like a real bitch.

  *

  AT THE APARTMENT most of my things are in boxes, half of them dedicated to the Salvation Army at my discretion. I strip from the costume like a surfer, the upper body hanging around my waist as I pour the contents of the refrigerator between two big slabs of stale rye bread and stand at the sink raining blood-colored drips from the beetroot dribbling into the garbage disposal. The plates and all that other domestic crap I will soon be freed from are cleaned and stacked in the cupboards, ready for my wife and daughter’s return. Ordinarily of an evening I would be maudlin by now, watching the sum total of three or four hours’ footage I have from when Tessa was young and Beth and I still had a chance. Now there’s only an empty chasm in my chest and a glower on my stubble-heavy face. I haven’t had an ordinary flu or virus since I was fifteen, but damn me to Hell if I’m not coming down with something.

  Sleep comes uneasily. I lay in the middle of the big double bed spread-eagled like I’m waiting for the bondage to begin and that’s exactly what it feels like, preparation for some kind of torture rather than sleep, and it occurs to me some time around 5am that lately I have spent more nights on the sofa than in the bedroom so it is no wonder I feel so damned uncomfortable. Around 7am, with the grey of the city starting to emerge through the banks of fog rolling in off the Atlantic, I finally relent and pick up the comforter and trudge through to the big window-spanning couches and lay down again and fall not too long after into a relatively dreamless sleep.

  The phone rings mid-afternoon and I sit up, calm as a businessman expecting his regular wake-up call. After wiping the crap from my lips I answer the unfamiliar number.

  “It’s me. Speak.”

  “It’s . . . Beth,” my wife says.

  “Oh.” I yawn.

  “Were you . . . did I wake you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus, Joe. You really have to sort yourself out. Did you get my messages?”

  I look at the machine. It’s blinking. I’d lie, but know she would catch me out. That may just be what this whole thing is about.

  “No,” I reply. “I got in late.”

  “Obviously. We’re moving in on Sunday.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s the day after tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  Beth pauses. It is my own fault for being half asleep, but I am damned if I can think of anything to say to halt the horrible direction of this conversation any more than I could arrest any of the others. It’s like watching a childhood accident in slow motion and having the sheer particles of time agglomerate against your limbs to stop you doing anything about it. All I can hope is that my soon-to-be former wife has at least some pity left, though as usual of late my hoping is in vain.

  “You will be gone, won’t you?” she asks cautiously. “I don’t just mean moved out. I don’t want you to be there when we come back.”

  “Christ, Beth. What did I do to make you so fucking cruel?”

  “You did nothing, Joe,” she snaps back.

  “That’s not meant to make you feel better. I’m not saying ‘it’s not you, it�
��s me’. My point is you did nothing. Okay? Nothing. And this is what you get when all that nothing accumulates over time. A great big FU.”

  I want to tell her I had hopes we could work this thing out. The real poison of the situation is that I now catch myself thinking about what she will say to my words, how I am throwing myself at her feet like a worm, like my pride and self-esteem are already compromised. My limited sense of self-preservation in such things stills my tongue and between the strategizing, my ruptured feelings, and my underlying desires, I have no real idea what I really do think. Such speculation is enough. The moment my response falters, Beth snaps her final instructions and goes.

  There doesn’t seem to be anything more to it. The phone drops in several pieces from my hand, molten plastic dribbling like a Subway dressing onto the glass coffee table. For good measure, I flash-fry the answering machine. As it flips over and the hard drive starts to bake, the bank starts playing back on a wavering line.

  “Hey dad? It’s just me. Tessa. Tried calling on your other phone, but it said you were overseas? I’m at George and Max’s till tomorrow tonight and I wanted to see you. Mum said . . . she said we’re moving to England. Can you please get back to me?” There’s a sound like tears. “Please. I’m scared and I don’t know what to do.”

  The machine gives up a little mini nuke cloud and the sound cuts out.

  Zephyr 4.15 “Damned Near Herculean”

  IT TAKES PRECISELY three minutes, fifteen seconds for me to regret the trick with the phone. Although I’ve cooked a few in my time – among the various other things and the numerous sets of sheets I’ve fried just from having bad dreams over the years during my marriage – on many occasions I have practiced the sort of restraint that you’d expect from any ordinary self-interested fella trying not to totally compromise his marriage. In me, though, you have to recognize that such efforts are damned near Herculean, and fuck it, I don’t know why I am explaining myself to you anyway. That phone – and yes I mean that phone in particular – had it coming for a long time. Trust me.