“Well, I see where you’re going with this, but I hardly think –”
“Hey, believe it.”
“Zephyr.”
“Think about it, Synergy. You could let that slide. But what about Chancellor, Paragon, Mantas . . . Twilight?”
“Between you and me, I don’t think a lot of Twilight’s income gets declared to the IRS,” Synergy says with a professional smirk. “Actually, we’re aware of an increase in your revenue stream of late, Zephyr. You’re going up in the world. Finally.”
“So you see what I mean.”
“Maybe you have a point, Zephyr. But then most conspiracy theorists do.”
I harrumph and I sense the female agent almost audibly change tack.
“I’m sorry about your mother.”
“If that’s my mother.”
There’s a beat, then she comes in with the kicker.
“We’ll need you to identify the body.”
My hand flies nervously to my chin. I stare, partly horrified, at the woman and wonder that I don’t look like a madman. Nonetheless, if any of my paranoid fears are to be borne true, this is a step I cannot avoid. I nod.
“Book me in.”
Zephyr 5.9 “A Small Role”
FROM DOWNTOWN, I turn myself south, flitting across the city amid a profusion of helicopters, F-16s on their safety mission high in the air above, blimps coming in from Germania, the UK and LA. A work crew is installing the most fuck-off enormous visual array on the roof of the Pantha Building and I’m just in time to catch one of the workers as they fall. After that and a half-dozen autographs, I slam across town and arrive at the postmodern offices of Hallory O’Hagan and associates.
“I need a lawyer,” I explain within five minutes to the red-hot redhead herself.
“Zephyr, you’ve already got a lawyer. We’ve got a . . . host of lawyers. Or whatever the group noun for lawyers is.”
“A debt,” I reply with mild authority. “But I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about my, you know, secret identity.”
“Oh shit,” Hallory says in this cute kind of drawn-out way and she slides into a chair beside me with an expression of baseless sympathy on her face. “What have you done?”
“Lady, I haven’t done anything,” I snap in reply. “It’s a family thing. My, uh, my other guy is getting divorced.”
“You mean you’re married?”
I shrug like you do when you’re also juggling at the same time, which figuratively I am. Her look is slightly aghast, but I do not know exactly what she expected I was signing up to when we shared a euphoric post-launch snog just a few days prior.
“It’s my other guy. He’s married,” I explain. “Or he was. It’s messy. There’s a child involved.”
“Jeez, Zephyr,” my publicist-in-chief replies. “This does sound messy. I wouldn’t recommend mixing your professional agency and your private life. It could compromise your identity, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, but I’m gonna need a hefty whack of this year’s royalties if I’m gonna do this thing.”
“Oh, by the way,” Hallory says as if it’s unrelated. “Did you sign those latest release forms?”
“Before I even came up,” I say. “What were they for, anyway?”
“Oh, just some projects in consideration. . . .” Hallory deftly dips into her Vivica Watson purse and I catch a glimpse of business card hell before she extracts a gold-colored card and passes it to me. It has a lawyer’s name on it, though I am reminded of the Azzurro card possibly still stuck in the wallspace of my former digs.
“Try this guy. Pete Liebenthal? He’s the best.”
“That sounds like the voice of experience.”
Hallory smiles.
“Just a stalker. Nothing major.”
“Hey, if you’ve got stalker problems you don’t need a lawyer. You’ve got me, right?”
Hallory smiles, but there’s a coldness to her blue-grey eyes.
“So how many children have you got exactly? And do they have any powers?” she asks. “We could do a whole line in mini-Zephyrs.”
I figure I better not tell her about my father’s proclivity for single-handedly trying to breed an entire generation of superbeings. The marketing people would die of conniptions.
*
BACK AT MONASTIC Central, I manage to squeeze in some valuable table time while Brasseye, Seeker and Vulcana are off at a tenement fire and Mastodon’s apparently in Paris for the latest Tarantino movie. It’s opening night. Apparently he had a small role.
As I stare at the geek fantasy in smoked glass, invisible technology connects my unconscious thoughts with a data feed from ten thousand possible universes. Images, news print, YouTube videos and surveillance cams sprout like the fevered imaginings of some leprous Andy Warhol-inspired revamp of the whole Christ franchise. If ever there was a clearer indication my own thoughts were in chaos, it’s there on the flat expanse as car bombings and plagues and religious assassinations and mothers clutching their mangled children and streets awash with sewage and dismemberment gush in a vitreous array trapped just beneath the surface of the impossibly advanced table. I try a few deep breaths and focus my thoughts, muttering under my breath sort of as the monks told me so I don’t feel like some reject from a Star Trek episode addressing the computer like it’s the Oracle of Delphi.
“Access the GPS co-ordinates contained on my cell and give me everything you can show in this parallel on the island nicknamed Krakatoa,” I say.
The transition is seamless. The urbane chaos fades away in the cosmic dark of the table’s depths and a satellite photo of an island in the Gulf of Thailand crispens into view. At my interest, the view zooms and the artistic details become surprisingly photo-realistic at a low altitude. The image shakes and blossoms into a dozen video streams: the deck footage from ocean-bound tankers, geological survey cameras from drone gliders, secretive Vietnamese Navy footage, three or four American honeymoon diving trips which mostly end without homicide, promotional clips for a Thai investment firm, an oil company, an adventure sports franchise, and a lure for international models, as well as shaky-handed footage from origins unknown.
Few of the clips or the accompanying articles that bloom along the dexter quadrant of the glass give any real insight into the place. A 1996 documentary cleverly translated for my benefit mentions the nearby archipelago as a former playground for the rich and famous, and apart from the obviously well-known tourist islands like Ko Pha Ngan and Ko Samui, these even lesser specks are flippantly mentioned as under private ownership by any number of European identities, investment banks, underworld money-laundering operations, etcetera.
None of them mention John Lennon aka The Preacher Man aka The Doomsday Man. Nonetheless, the co-ordinates identify the place perfectly and the remarkable information system pulls invoices from a dozen companies contracted to do work there during the past five decades. From there, it’s a small matter to retrieve blueprints and schematics for the island’s few structures, including a curiously bomb resistant-looking bunker complex built over the course of two years by the Siam Pha Thom Concrete Company registered to Trat, southern Thailand, in the mid-70s. I am damned if I know how you print from this thing so I simply give a good eyeball to the maps and the outline data streaming past, and then, reflecting my clearing mood, the datastreams begin to wink out of existence one by one.
It looks like a trip to Thailand is on the cards.
*
ALL THE SIGNIFIERS are broiling away inside my skull and I stare hard at the dormant glass table long enough that new images begin to take shape and form.
Ono.
There have been only candid snaps of the Japanese woman over the years. For a long time she stayed in the background due to her lover’s popularity and her own comparative dislike for celebrity. In the grainy old pre-digital images, she’s little more than a medieval woodcut, all cheekbones and shadowed eyes, that lustrous black hair I have seen come alive like a Medusa’s nightmare,
in the dot matrix print of yesteryear it all seems innocuous enough.
“How would I find her?”
The words break free of my lips without anything but the suggestion of conscious thought. Immediately, the vision on the screen departs like a scroll when it is rolled together. In its place, like a time lapse of pimples on a teenager’s face, tiny images appear at random on the black space, each slowly growing, cohering as the system accumulates the data I desire.
The images represent a timeline as well as a network of social connections. I can’t even pretend to think what sort of means the machine has available to it that it can put together such information so immediately, but it seems to aggregate recurring references to people, places and organizations so that an image emerges of Ono’s habits and associations, places she has been known to frequent on a more than casual basis, important people who have played significant roles in her life, and social institutions in which she has been more or less directly involved in during her seventy-something years.
Seventy? The number doesn’t collate with the image I have in my mind. Her hard, angular face as she emerged like the most dreadful of black-winged butterflies from the husk of my second mother’s identity was that of a woman not over the age of forty. A well-maintained forty. A forty good enough to kick some serious ass, I’m willing to bet.
Again, like the unreliable cameras they are, my eyes play over the information the god-box provides and I commit to memory what I can. I have names, dates, places, routines. Good enough to begin.
Zephyr 5.10 “Stage Fright”
THERE ISN’T MUCH left to the corpse and I am unable to really confirm it is my mother lying there on the surgical white slab. An awkward-looking mortician and three agents – Synergy, Annie Black, and a black guy in a brown suit called Tempo – ring around me as I stare at the grisly remains like a stage fright-struck performance poet. I feel a pressure to emote, to feel something, yet between the confluence of data still fresh in my brain and the quest for truth in which I’m currently entangled, nothing’s forthcoming. I look from one end of the table to the other and random memories, perhaps even the quasi-sensual memories of breastfeeding and baby snuggling, my first bath, all the residual goo-ing and gah-ing war at me from within. And I am damned glad I’m not near the Wallachians’ table now for fear of what images it might provide.
“Zephyr?” Synergy asks because it’s been a while.
“I’m sorry. I’m not sure what to say.”
“If there is anything about the . . . deceased . . . that you could recognize?” the black guy asks.
“That could be anyone. I’m sorry.”
There’s a touch of iron in Synergy’s voice as she says, “We told you, the genetic markers indicate parahuman abilities.”
“But what sort?” I turn to her and ask.
Synergy glances at the guy in the lab coat.
“It will take time to get any sort of idea of her domain,” the guy says and obviously feels like a chimp.
I feel sorry for him, so I nod and shrug and glance back at the husk. It is so abstract that it doesn’t even feel like a human being, let alone the woman who brought me into the world. Yet there is nothing to indicate otherwise. And Occam’s razor delineates the reality, that this must be my mother. My birth mother, lying there immolated in what’s either some ironic reversal or a grand mystery, a fire-controller burnt to death. Rather than ask why I feel so little – shock, a small voice tells me, is a good explanation for anything – I wonder instead why there are so many unanswered questions. If this is my mother dead, then fine. But what happened to Maxine? Was there ever a Granny Max? Was it Ono in some weird complicated and impassioned lie the whole time? Was it my father’s one-time mistress who coddled and cuddled and cozied up to me through my entire youth?
“Fuck.”
For a moment, I’m not aware that I’ve spoken aloud, but the agents and the lab rat look willing to indulge me. Synergy wants to see that I am human and so I grant her that, clutching my fists and giving a nervous expulsion of breath and then storming from the room. She follows me into the hall, she alone.
“Zephyr, are you alright?”
“Do I look alright to you, agent?”
“I’m just . . . sorry.”
“Glad you are. Glad somebody is. Thank you.”
I think that’s quite enough. I nod curtly and walk down to the elevator and from there to the roof, no real idea where I’m going.
*
ANY OTHER DAY and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tragedian suddenly took a hospital hostage or Cogito emerged from a future timeline to try his hand at ruling the world again. Instead, it begins snowing as I arc across the glittering metropolis with my face clenched tight as my asshole, fists like chunks of coal formed hard as the very earth itself by the fractal pressure of millennia. I hit the water over the river hard enough to leaven flakes of ice from the water’s surface in my wake.
Snow drifts like ash once did across the blackened husk of my childhood home. The yellow crime scene tape hangs wilted like some manner of alien topiary, a neglected reminder of even unhappier times. I am glad the fire crews saved the big tree in the front yard. I used to shimmy into that tree on fine nights with my telescope and a book of the stars, imagining a dad to whom I’d speak my dreams and wonders and fears, drinking in the deliciously bittersweet textures of narcissistic adolescence and romanticized sorrow. How hard done by I felt for many years, cooped up in this house with a pair of crazy dykes who fought and in turn made up in passionate bouts surrounded by so many friends and fellow adventurers it sometimes felt like I fell through the cracks, my obvious masculinity an inconvenience to be ignored. Apart from a few kids possibly weirder than me, my house wasn’t a place where friends gathered, where happy childhoods unfolded. Most the time I was lucky enough the passive aggression of the suburbs meant the other moms soldered their lips shut when they caught a whiff of my unusual home life, and a few of them were even decent enough to not expect their little Johnnies to bring home a better quality of playmate. Once adolescence hit, things weren’t so bad, pubescent rebellion justifying my inner revolution and resistance to the strange alternate dominant order my mothers created within the home.
Now the house is gone. In its place are big sand pits filled with ash and chunks of charcoal and bits and pieces that must’ve once been suitably retro for Maxine to collect. Or Ono. Or whoever.
The back shed is scorched, but still standing, and the greenhouse is flush with dead plants. The only other structure is the coal-limned frame of the metal safe room in the middle of the shell of the floor plan. More police stickers are emblazoned across its fire-scarred surface. Whatever the reason, the titanium door remains in place and I walk through the ashes stepping slowly, but not particularly carefully as I approach the weird structure like it’s some ancient megalith and not a particularly high-tech interference in the memories of my inner child. My hand rests over the locking mechanism and I can feel internal electrics hum. One jolt and the whole thing goes still and the terminator grey surface clicks open and slowly ajar.
The safe room was built in a false cavity between two rooms, narrow enough that only a careful observer would miss the discrepancy in its depths. Having fried its separate power source, I can hardly expect a light as the metal door creaks open and I step into the fridge-like inner space, and there’s a pair of torches on a wire mesh shelf and I flick one on with a snap of my wrist to reveal the submarine bunk beds I never knew about and thankfully never needed all the days of my youth. Likewise a tiny desk, metal also, with a dead computer on it, a small refrigerator below, pens and notepads, a box of Scrabble, a photo album. There are monitors on the facing wall, but these are dead too. I imagine there’s one for every room, my parents prepared for some cataclysmic attack that never came until they provided it themselves. How weird.
I take the photo album from the tray just as a shadow passes the doorway. I snap about and glimpse the ghost with white skin and black
hair.
“Joseph.”
“You.”
I toss the book aside and my fists curl in the primal instinct inherent to mankind since the first caveman tussled with his first grizzly. Ono’s devil’s mask forms into a tiny O of surprise and then I power up and smash into her like the last time, and we go tumbling into the blinding daylight.
Zephyr 5.11 “The Demoness”
I SWING MY fist with some satisfaction hard into the side of the Japanese woman’s skull. The force sends her flying like some costly rag figurine, across what once would’ve been the drive and into the aging green-painted pickets of the neighbor’s fence. Ono rolls over amid the grickle grass and poison ivy and oleander, and as she splays her hands, her fingers extend into elongated razors of pure blackness just as her hair writhes far beyond its usual scope to twist and cloak around her body.
“Joseph,” she hisses again in her bizarre, alien-accented voice, the word a warning and a plea at the same time.
I wanted to find this woman and now she’s here all I want to do is smash her into smithereens. I lift my palm and a jolt of crackling disruption lances out to caress her torso and she grimaces and twitches and groans and drops back, rolling once free across the undergrowth, the scattered pickets marking the base of the neighbor’s oak tree bare, an ancient pine swing seat twisted loose, the stilted foundations of the cedar-clad house next door exposed as Ono gets up again and starts to run. I pour on the speed, get behind her with my hands on the backs of her shoulders and run her into the parked SUV hard enough to set off the alarms.
Again comes that nagging little warning voice that if I draw attention here, my personal history gets laid bare. Old Joshua Mollins lived next to us my entire childhood, and when he died a few years back, his niece, the Imperator-driver, slotted into the upwardly mobile district quite nicely. She’ll know me and make the connection like so many others should’ve, and then the fat lady will be truly howling.
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