The back door nearly comes off in my hand as I step inside the lovingly-preserved vintage kitchen. This 1960s fetish is starting to cloy with me and I drink in the stale smell of mildew and old furniture and think perhaps the house would be better gone, as long as it took the memories with it. I have no idea how much of my childhood is a lie and it is curious I do not even pause to inspect my half-brother’s comments or to doubt them. While I have done enough hours of postmodern theory at night school during the years to dispense with any sense of the intrinsic or the essential, I can’t deny that his words, weirdly-accented as they were, had the whir of truth to them. How this can be, spun by a perfect stranger, undoing the statements of someone I have known my whole lifetime? I cannot explain. I can only hope to yield greater clarity.
“Tessa? Mum? Mom?”
The silence teases me – takes my fibrillating heart and squeezes. I scan the room and note the furnishings unchecked, the invisible but intuitively perceptible barometry completely ordinary. Everything as one would expect. Only the silence echoes back to me, triggering my distrust.
“Dad? Is that you?”
Tessa’s voice seems weirdly amplified. I nod, then say something emphatic that wouldn’t pass the censors. A section of vintage wallpapering and a photo of my moms and I at a junior softball game (Maxine’s Women’s Studies Department annual sundowner barbecue and softball game 1987) slides open with a gasp of concealed mechanisms to reveal a narrow, metal-lined safe room. Tessa crouches uncomfortably in the recess along with the two older ladies, each with their own unique expressions to mitigate the unusual circumstances.
“Sorry about that, son,” Georgia brogues. “House computer. You triggered our velocity alert. What are you doin’ flyin’ straight in like that?”
“Your mother thought you were a god-damned Exorcet, Joe,” Max says.
“Since when have you had a . . . house computer?”
“It’s pretty neat, dad. You should’ve had something similar in the wallspace,” Tessa says.
I don’t reply. I fix George with a meaningful glare, but she only shrugs.
“It’s only once in a blue moon,” she says. “Only ever false alarms, too.”
“That’s a pretty paranoid set-up for someone trying to play at being civilian,” I respond slowly.
Neither of the old women seem to get me or my changed mood and Maxine crosses the living room and steps down into the kitchen and goes to ready the still-dented kettle while George makes the face she reserves for really wanting a cigarette and crosses to an armchair instead and picks up her knitting.
Into that domestic silence I feel completely unable to lob the verbal equivalent of a napalm attack. Yet I know that’s what’s required. Helplessly, I catch Tessa’s eye, noting at once the renewed sensitivity, something fragile about her eyeliner, the little teeth-marks on her lip, the way she waits for me to look yet won’t quite catch my eye.
“You got my message?” she asks.
“I did. The phone didn’t lie. I was in France.”
“Oh, France’d be lovely at this time of the year,” George says wistfully and examines her tangled yarns like a pathologist with the intestines of a prized cadaver. “Whatever were you doin’ there, Joseph?”
“Visiting my brother.”
I grimace with the hard-won smile as the ambient curiosity bleeds from the room and I watch as Maxine’s expression makes a head-long dash for the morgue. George isn’t much better. She glances several times at the wool and then makes a face, tossing the lot back into the dinky little basket and standing slowly to begin the search for her smokes.
“You’d remember him, wouldn’t you ma? Little Julian?”
“Julian? Well, I know him from his records more, you know. . . .”
“Surely not,” I say.
“Well. . . .”
“He remembers you.”
George looks. The blue eyes remain locked on mine. As I said, my face is in lockdown, but I know she can see the anger and the knowledge, the combined righteousness. It’s a death to the life we’ve known. When her voice comes, it is spidery and slow, afraid like fingers probing in the dark to find something hurtful within the unknown.
“No. What did he tell you, Joe?”
“Let’s put it this way,” I reply. “He remembers me. Remembers me as a goddamn five-year-old.”
George’s gaze flickers and dies away. Half-satisfied, I look at Maxine with the sort of vengeful curiosity one reserves for vanquished enemies rather than family members.
“He knows,” Max says, not to me, but to my other mother.
The voice is odd. Something almost robot in the tone if not the delivery. I’m still sizing this up, following her line of sight across the room, and not quite prepared for the look of slack vacation in Georgia’s face. Her glowing blue eyes are dark, her face like a high street bookshop shut up for renovations.
“Georgia,” Maxine says again. “He knows. I’m sorry. Activating condition Triple Omega.”
Now I’m alarmed. And when I look to my other mother, the one who nursed me in my childhood illnesses, who let me eat jelly straight from the spoon, who regaled me with gender-neutral fairytales as I drooped toward bedtime, and who always seemed to be making up for the fact it was Georgia who physically carried me into the world, instead a stranger is in her place: a five-foot-nothing Japanese women with hair made from snakes of living darkness that dance and flicker in the suddenly corrupt light.
“Dad!”
I look at Tessa staring and backing away in horror from her grandmother George. The old lady has her head down and her hands clenched into fists by her sides. Blue flames crackle up her arms making a distressed rag of her seafarer’s woolens. Then her head snaps up to reveal the face of a grinning mannequin.
*
THE ROOM FILLS with blue fire, expanding from a point scant inches from my mother’s face and rushing outward like something only seen in a movie.
Just as I throw myself to the floor, the gas-fire bubbles strike an invisible wall. The blue flames curl back on themselves and in some areas they’re extinguished and I see Tessa with her wrists crossed before herself and her youthful brow furrowed in concentration that buoys me with pride. From my prostrate view I turn and eye the demoness Ono, shadows like a costume across her shape-shifter’s form. And from the floor, I catapult toward her, determined to wring some manner of explanation.
I’m pleased the Japanese woman proves more substantial than she appears. While confusion remains around the identity and whereabouts of Maxine, perhaps you can imagine, it’s a satisfying experience to ram Ono into and through the kitchen cabinetry. I picture Beatles fans worldwide would auction their newborn young on eBay to get the chance to play linebacker in this fantasy scenario, though seconds after she and I emerge through the other side of the wall and topple into the gravel-strewn drive, the woman disappears in a whirligig of black medusa tendrils.
Rolling like the man once taught me, I come up with my kung fu grip at the ready only to see smoke and flames flickering from most the windows of my childhood home. My only real thought is for Tessa, so I deliberately pound through another section of weatherboard outcrop and power upward, shredding ancient carpet and floorboards as I appear across the living room and behind where my baby girl uses her nascent powers to keep her deranged grandma at bay.
“You’re doing good, honey!” I boom from behind.
“Dad!” Tess replied. “What the hell is going on?”
“We’ll figure it out later, babe.”
One look at mum tells me this isn’t going to be easy. Where before her eyes had merely lost their luster, now they’ve rolled back into her head completely and I’m tempted to think this means she’s not in the driver’s seat. Condition Triple Omega doesn’t sound very good. And somehow I think Condition Triple Omega is me.
Georgia turns more directly toward us. There’s a zombie-like quality to her movements I’m keen to exploit. I sign-language Tessa to the gaping e
xit behind her and do the linebacker thing again, in fact moving more like a tight end as I dive and pour on the amps to hit my dear mother in the midriff and carry her more or less directly through the back door.
We crash into the woodshed. I had joked before about the old yellow motorcycle being stored inside, yet I’m not entirely surprised to see an antique car, an Aston Martin if I’m not going mad, concealed beneath a tarpaulin. Our collision jostles it aside, the closest one of its doors staved in. Without even really looking at me, George swings a powerful fist and catches me cold. One moment we’re sprawled amid ropes and canvas and the next I crash into the greenhouse. I push a few delicate pots out of the way amid my scramble and their destruction fills my ears sufficiently long enough that I don’t hear the fire alarm until I’ve waded from the wreckage and spy Georgia making a bee-line for the house again, blue flames turning yellow in her wake.
“Stop!”
There’s only a hint of hesitation before I light her up. Given the punch I just received, I am thinking ol’ Catchfire can take a few volts. I remember newsreel footage showing her getting tagged by a tank, so a few meagre currents aren’t gonna kill her, fingers crossed. In fact, I am readying up a second load when I flashback to George saying it was the Crimson Cowl who killed Titanium Girl’s kid – just some more undiscovered family business to talk about with Julian next time we meet.
As expected, the lightning only slows George down. She runs like one of them new-fangled zombies straight into the house and disappears, though I am relieved to see Tessa hovering over the roof like a good girl, somehow changed into her Windsong gear, and flames and shit lick up the sides of the wall and it doesn’t look good. In fact it’s hard to believe it has only been a couple of minutes since Catchfire started up with the fire attack because parts of the house are crumbling inward already and I can hear neighbors, and people on the street out front screaming. Next thing it’ll be the fire trucks and then the goddamn media. I wave to get Tess’s attention from the backyard and she flits lithe as a hummingbird down beside me.
“Honey, we’ve got to clear out of here,” I say.
“What about Grandma George, dad?” she says in tears. “What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”
“Did Grandma go in there?”
I look at the house. The guttering over the back kitchen door collapses and smoke oozes through the wrecked fissure. I hurl another lightning bolt at the back wall to blast a hole, but it seems nearly useless amid roiling smoke. Tessa concentrates her powers and I can feel the moisture drawing into the air around us, releasing in a fine mist that is a long way from being rain.
“It’s too hot,” Windsong groans. “Can’t get any water density. Not enough for those flames.”
I look at the house, my childhood home, burning there before us, my mother presumably inside. Yet a cold voice – one I have only sometimes obeyed throughout my career in costume – tells me to make the choice.
“Baby, we have to go.”
I take her upper arm.
“That’s Grandma George in there,” Tessa sobs.
“Maybe,” I reply. “Honey, that’s our secret identity on fire. Okay? We have to haul ass. Let’s go.”
Tessa looks at me, glinting eyes blinking through my own mask, and comprehension fights with emotion until after long seconds she nods.
Holding hands, we set up into the sky and book.
*
TESSA TREMBLES LIKE someone with Parkinson’s, tears cutting tracks through the soot on her sweet face. The whites of her eyes are red and she can barely speak as we alight in a park maybe ten blocks from where ragged plumes of smoke churn into the air. Her hand, strangely adult with her fair, varnished nails, clutch at the leather casing of my chest. The words fall like there’s an individual labor behind each one, difficult and belated. It’s easy to forget that whatever my own feelings, these suddenly mysterious figures have been a mainstay of her whole life.
“We just . . . left her . . . Grandma . . . to die. She’s . . . the fire, dad.”
I curl my hand and forearm around her head and draw her into me.
“It’s not as simple as that, babe.”
“Why?” she asks, voice muffled.
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“I saw . . . saw . . . Granny Max . . . Who was that?”
Ono.
“I’m not really sure I can say, honey.”
“She controls fire. She can survive that, right?”
“It’s possible.”
“You think she was . . . in the house?”
Tessa can feel me nod. I hold her close. Words are pretty much as useless now as they ever are, their barrenness made stark in the moment.
We stand for long enough I begin to cogitate on the other great fear, us being spotted by photographers. I gently coax Windsong toward the bandstand and we move under the shadowed atrium and the lamplight seems to bend, come twisting down between the leaves to dapple our faces and soften the awful reality. Tessa drinks in a great big staggering breath and I can feel the tears do their work, the all-too mortal soporific Darwin’s gods gave us to compensate for our bite or two from the Tree of Knowledge and Death. A stillness enters the girl and eventually she releases my hand. We are just two leather-clad fugitives from fashion sitting side-by-side like disenfranchised emo kids everywhere, bums on the steps of the rotunda as we contemplate the ineffable.
“You got my phone message?”
“I did,” I say. “When was that? Yesterday?”
“Yes.”
I look sideways a moment, but my daughter has the whole jaded, bored, listless teen thing going on.
“I was taking your advice. I was in France.”
“How did it go?”
“Well, I met Julian,” I say to her. My expression is enough to still any further questions and as a further distraction I ask, “What’s this about England?”
“I don’t know where mom gets these ideas,” Tessa says. “They are thinking about opening another office for Baskin Robbins or whoever the heck it is she works for . . . a London office.”
“Bakhtin-McRoberts,” I say tonelessly.
It’s not really me speaking, more a sense memory made flesh from years of my wife’s dry repetition.
“London?”
“Dad, she’s really into it. ‘A fresh start’.”
“She’s got no idea,” I say and I’m not really sure what I mean by it.
I idly wonder if my mother’s near-impenetrable flesh is cooking within the coals of my childhood home.
Behind the mask, Tessa’s eyes are again welling.
“Will you do something, dad?” Before I can answer, she adds: “I mean, really really do something. Not just one of your promises, okay? I really need you to do this.”
“I’m not sure I can,” I say softly. “I guess I’ll need a lawyer.”
“Well derr, dad,” the girl says. “Jesus, did this just occur to you now?”
“Honey, divorces, they’re really just a formality these days . . . especially if there’s not a lot of money involved.”
She stares at me for a few moments. Big raindrops start to clatter down from what was previously a chill and spotless sky. It’s the trembling lower lip that gets me.
“What?”
“Weren’t you going to . . . fight her for me?”
“Fight her for you?”
Six million frigging lightbulbs and all, but I can be a bit slow, sometimes.
“Custody, dad,” Tessa replies like the very spirit of exasperation.
“Your mum talked about access. . . .”
“And were you going to ask me?” Tessa cries. I say nothing and eventually she adds: “She’s serious about this move, dad. You have to fight it.”
“You . . . want me to fight it?”
The expression on her face is like a time lapse of the dawn, a dozen different things imperceptibly changing at once as she radiates
through frustration to hope to anger.
The sky booms. Thunder peals across the city and somewhere close by a skittish security alarm starts up like a startled guard dog. Then the rain comes, just the brush of a wet curtain at first before the real weight of the downpour begins and nearly erases Tessa’s words.
“When are you going to understand? I want to be with you.”
I wouldn’t call it passivity, though that’s how it appears, the resignation to some dumb domestic fate. In my experience, a woman wants a husband who’s easily led, or that’s what I foolishly believed, and I guess for a long time I’ve fallen in with that, especially when compliance is such a lie and all the good things, at least for such a long time, have always happened away in a blaze of ozone and black leather. That said, amid what few good feelings I have salvaged from my wanted yet suddenly unwanted freedom, playing single dad never occurred to me as part of the repertoire.
Sitting across from Tessa, the rainfall little more than the actualization of some daft metaphor, waves of teenage angst roll off her and register as barometric shivers affecting everything from the humidity to the flow of air around us.
My hand goes to her shoulder and gives one of my trademarked hesitant-but-fatherly squeezes. It’s not a gesture of reassurance. I suspect Tessa has been left disappointed far too many times for that.
But it is a commitment of sorts, and for now that is enough.
We depart on separate vectors and I wonder if this is how we will spend our time together if Beth gets her way and moves to England.
Over my dead body.
Zephyr 4.17 “Curious In Its Absence”
SEEKER MEETS ME at a bus shelter near the Colonel Oliver North tennis stadium, me with a rucksack, a new laptop still in its cardboard box, and another cardboard box full of the assorted crap from my past nearly twenty years as a married dude. Seeker’s wearing Marconi aviator glasses, a Ralph Lauren overcoat, a tartan scarf by Zudzi, fawn knee-highs by Rebecca Di Marsi and Finnegan Wake winter jodhpurs. Her wild hair is ensconced within a Hoodlamb eco-fur faux bearskin cap that manages to look sexy on her, not at all like a disemboweled marmot pulled on over her skull. Truly. She has a wry smile for me. Seeker does wry well, like she’s had plenty of practice, and I wonder why that might be until I remember we’ve been teammates on and off the past six, seven years. Uh-huh.
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