The demoness peels herself from the sizeable dent she’s made in the flank of the gunmetal grey chassis of the car, horn and blinkers resounding across the snow-dusted front yard. A single tear of blood runs from Ono’s mouth and down her chin. She seems to leer at me like some blood-drinking thing as she wipes the smear with the back of her palm and her black hair forms and reforms into abstract geometry around her.
“You’re not ready,” Ono says in that clipped tone of hers.
“I want my mother back,” I say.
“I knew you weren’t ready. Might never be ready. This proves it. You’re too much still his child.”
Ono shakes her head and when I move my hand, making like perhaps I’m going to light her up again, one of the tendrils whip out and wrap tight around my wrist. Out of self-preservation alone, I lift my remaining arm and another tendril attaches there as well. Now it’s my turn to sneer as I wonder just how conductive this shadowstuff could really be. I clench my fists tight and give up enough juice to light a small New Hampshire community, only to see the demoness disappear in a swirl of black vapors before I’m done.
The empty air crackles with the discharge just as the wire door of the house bangs open and quicker’n you can say ‘boo,’ I haul ass into the sky.
I return later, as darkness enfolds the city in its embrace, but the photo album is gone. I stand in the banks of ashes and view the yard forlornly, and in a couple of days I will find a letter from Georgia’s lawyer in my new PO Box, transferring ownership of the property into my name. When I call from a payphone with the other members of the team waiting for me to suit up and go help them with a hostage situation at a college football game, the lawyer’s office tells me there’s no records for Maxine whatsoever. Eventually I get the old principal of the firm on the line and he recalls meeting the lady, but given their relationship status there’s nothing legal entitling Max to a share and no details on how to find her even if it did. She’s effectively ceased to exist.
I nod. I have some wealth, suddenly. Later, a few calls to a few people and a ten thousand-dollar check to a planning consultant and the way’s paved for permission to flatten the site and rebuild. I don’t have the money for the house myself, but George has left nearly a hundred grand for me and a similar amount for Tessa, and a collector in Hoboken offers a hundred-twenty-five for the scorched Aston Martin in the garage. And in my civvies, I meet him on site and sling some bullshit about Maxine’s retro collection extending to Titanium Girl’s go-go car bought on the cheap not long after she overdosed back whenever that was.
The builders tell me the house could be finished by the end of spring.
I leave the foreman a photo from the street showing how it looked the year of my ninth birthday. There’s a little me in black plastic chaps and a gunslinger’s sombrero, not quite tricked out for the Pride parade, but something close to it. No wonder the old bags approved, since they confiscated the guns that came with the costume because it might be a bad influence or could naturalize the hegemonic power relations inherent to all phallic imagery. The irony.
In the photo I’m looking at the camera like I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing – a cynicism that has remained a constant throughout my life. And I think what once might’ve been a flaw has now been revealed as a vital skill, polished and honed in the dark like an assassin’s knife, and now I’ll need it like I’ve never needed it before.
*
THE ICE IS building up on the sidewalks of Atlantic City. I sling a homeless guy five dollars. Anything else and I’d have to write a check, even though being able to write a check is a relatively new experience for me. He looks at me with puppy dog eyes and I can’t help but wince and think he could certainly do with a long weekend at a day spa. I need him to move so I can access the lobby of my old digs, we’re like best pals. He mouths something unintelligible and I get in through the familiar Perspex doors and scan the mailboxes for the name change I already anticipated.
Beth has gone back to O’Shaunnessy. Like I said, I’m not surprised.
I thumb the lift, relaxed and handsomely disheveled in aviator sunglasses, a dirty white t-shirt under a loose leather jacket, chinos, new Rossi cycle boots. If you think that sounds like the civilian paradigm of my hero costume, you wouldn’t be the first to have that thought. The military issue great coat I wear over the whole thing rather dims the effect, but fuck, it’s snowing.
The smell of Elisabeth’s cigarettes cling to the carriage even as I ride up. Trepidation fills my mouth, threatens to leak from my ass. Sorry for the image, but it’s true. I’m more afraid of this than going toe-to-toe with World-Eater or the Ill Centurion. And history tells me I have very good reason to fear.
She’s on the phone as she opens the door, my arrival completely unexpected (forewarned is forearmed, as they say, and I can’t have that). In her other hand is a cigarette and for some reason the faucet in the kitchen is running full-bore as well. Her eyes go hooded when she sees me. The cigarette, stuck for convenience in the corner of her mouth, droops indicatively and the smoke clings to the intermission between us like a ghost.
“Jenny,” Beth says, pronouncing it the Swedish way. “I’ll call you back.”
In a practiced move she disconnects the cell and pockets it, swaps the smoke from her lips to her hand and rests one palm against the door frame.
“Hi,” I say.
“What are you doing here?”
“Going to invite me in?”
Beth takes a drag. This is too studied a performance to be impromptu. That means she’s been anticipating such a moment, preparing for it.
“Nope. Answer my question.”
“I had to stop by and get something.”
“I thought I told you to make sure you didn’t need to come back?”
“Hey,” I say and shrug and give a lame laugh. “I’m only human, OK?”
Beth harrumphs.
“I don’t think you can use that excuse.”
But she steps aside and lets me into the apartment.
Nothing has changed except entirely new décor. Only the television remains, tuned to that show where Dirk Cameron plays a hero who’s lost his powers and struggles on as a nocturnal vigilante called the Bat Man or something equally stupid. As I blink in slow motion, it cuts to an ad break for colostomy bags and then a promo for the Paragon/Jocelyn wedding special. I shudder.
“You’re not here to watch TV, Joe,” Beth scolds me. She exhales pent-up smoke and adds, “Get on with it.”
“Fucking hell, Beth. Try and be civil, will ya?”
I ignore her astonished glare and go for the bathroom and then into the wallspace. I refuse to linger long enough for nostalgia and depression to beset me. A pall of dust already clings to my pathetic old secret headquarters and it only takes me a moment to scrape my business card collection into a shopping bag I have coincidentally found in my pocket. It has an old pop tart in it that I decide to save for later. I don’t think I’ve worn this coat since Tessa was a little kid. I glance around once knowingly and then step back into the white bathroom and thump the panel that closes the secret door.
Beth’s cooling her heels in the kitchen nook. She’s smoking again, one arm across her chest and under her elbow. Her dark hair spills like a conundrum over the shoulders of a white mohair cardigan left erotically unbuttoned near her navel. She’s also wearing $500 Ralph Lauren cargo pants and strappy Vivica Watson sandals.
“Where’s Tess?”
“At a friend’s.” Beth inhales, exhales. “You really fucked her over with this whole grandmother thing.”
“That would be my . . . dead . . . mother,” I reply.
She shrugs as if to suggest I’ve fabricated the whole thing just to be inconvenient.
“They were just starting to get close.”
“You must’ve hated that.”
Point scored, Beth glares and says nothing. She turns, abruptness written in every line of her body, and grinds out the cigarette end in the
moist sink.
“Time’s up, Joseph.”
I nod slowly, already backing for the door.
“I am actually glad.”
Zephyr 5.12 “My Pal The Anti-Hero”
HERE I AM with the keys to the kingdom and not sure I’ve really got the bottle to use it, as the Brits might say. There’s enough reasons in my life to feel like shit without even starting to examine the problems associated with my costumed alter ego. But like the ringing phone on my belt, sometimes these things just pop up their heads to say “Hi” and vomit like a baby down your back.
As a true indication of my scattered thoughts, I have flown from my old apartment to Fort Hancock, the foamy grey expanse of the Atlantic and the hovering gulls a strange salve to my disenchantment. I haven’t been here since I was a kid and in fact didn’t even remember it until arriving here, drawn to the big wind-tattered billboards promising a housing development that lost its finance years ago. I move to a neglected boardwalk seat and drop onto it heavily, just another leather-jacketed drifter in the rundown part of town.
“What is it now?” I moan to Seeker as I answer the incessant call.
“Where are you?”
“Why is that the first thing people ask when ringing a cell?” I say. “You’ve got gazillions of Twenty-First Century tech in that baby of yours. Can’t you track me?”
I hang up the phone having set the challenge. Poor Seeker will probably interpret it is a cry for help and sure enough there’s a familiar time-space wobbling sensation and the Wallachian fortress materializes somewhere behind me. I don’t turn or otherwise acknowledge it and wait until Seeker herself walks down the planks behind me, hand on the back of the bench tentative as she drinks in my foul mood and the seaweed-reeking ambience. It might’ve been snowing, but the ocean wind befouls the stuff almost immediately so it becomes just another part of the rotting clime.
“Are you feeling messed up?”
“You don’t want to know about,” I say. “Really. Why were you calling?”
“I wanted to know you’ve got this Mafia thing handled,” she says.
“You were calling about that? Jesus.”
“Please, Zephyr. The blasphemy. . . .”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
We stare at the ocean a while.
“I’ll speak to Azzurro about the Riker’s thing,” I say eventually.
“That would be good. Call the team in, if you get anything.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic,” Seeker says. “Zephyr, don’t you want to be on the team anymore?”
“Jeez, we’ve barely started,” I say.
“Yeah I know, and I don’t think you’ve shown much enthusiasm even then.”
“More than Samurai Girl. Where the fuck did she go?”
“I don’t know,” Seeker says. “I’m worried about her.”
“Me too, I guess,” I lie. “Maybe that’s something you guys could look into. You know, while I’m handling the Mafia thing?”
“You think?”
I decline to bite the girl’s head off. Instead, I stand and gruffly grip the rail, a big piece of it snapping off in my hand. I throw it into the brine and it makes a fizzing noise like it’s dissolved as it sinks from view.
“You don’t sound very happy,” Seeker says and I count to three before her hand rests on my shoulder.
“I’ve just got a few things going on at the moment,” I tell her. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be on board in a little bit. Try and dig up what you can on our missing teammate and give me a holler when you need to get the team together.”
I look at her for the first time. Seeker’s brown eyes are moist with emotion.
“I guess that means I should go,” she says.
I nod. She takes a few hesitant steps towards the mother ship.
“You don’t want a ride?”
“No,” I say. “I’ve got a few things to handle here. You go ahead.”
Seeker nods and says something else I don’t quite catch and then she stuffs her hands into the pockets of the white parka she is wearing as a winter variation to her costume as she mounts the ramp and the drawbridge and disappears back inside the castle.
When next I look it is gone. I turn back to the waves and watch the ocean heave slowly back and forth like a great grinding set of lungs, dead fish and chunks of wood and brightly-colored plastics disgorged upon the beach. Somewhere north a flare goes off, but I don’t think this is a job for me. Frankly, too bad if it is. I thumb the Toecutter’s card from my vest again and tickle the corner with my finger as I contemplate the number.
There’s one more person who might be able to help.
*
TWILIGHT INSISTS ON meeting me at Barcadia. I have phoned ahead and tentatively laid out what I know, what I want him to tell me. It’s awkward, like watching baby fish feeding from each other’s mouths. Their lives depend on it, but one false move and it just looks like kissing. And Twilight is one guy I desperately do not want to send the wrong signals.
Barcadia is a bar within the glittering Hang Tsien Building on Ottoman and Ray. Designed by Germans with a Chinese budget and Ming Dynasty influence, the end result is an iron-and-glass prism lit within like a postmodern canary cage. At each of the sixteen levels almost everything is transparent, and Barcadia emerges from the tangled topiary of a six-star Chinese restaurant, the waiters lined up at the entrance ready to guide you to a table or throw a punch or possibly both. They resemble Jet Li in any one of his period pieces, the long pony tails and shaved foreheads a unique look unlikely to come into fashion again.
Twilight lounges at the bar like any regular six-and-a-half foot Joe in grey spandex and shadowed cloak. The hardbodies melt away at my approach, and half-sozzled already, the big guy grants me his best cheeky grin as I ease my butt onto the high stool, the friction of leather-on-leather leaving the way open to fart jokes and various other comments about my ass. Touchy territory.
“Thanks for meeting me,” I tell him.
“Not at all. Thanks for the excuse to get out.”
I nod to no one in particular and order a Stoli. Twilight makes it two. There’s some kind of implied homo-eroticism in copying my drinks order that leaves us in uncomfortable silence for two or three seconds that feels as long as spring break. When I speak, so does he, and suddenly we’re in a David Mamet play. Twilight laughs, the bray like a lycanthropic camel that stills the room and tosses heads our way. In the one tableau I recognize Konstantin Karlsson, King Albert of Belgium, Denzel Washington, Matt Groening, Nancy Drew, Jean-Claude Van Damme, John Woo, Jenna Jameson, Renee Zellweger, Justin Bieber and Julian Clary dressed to the nines as a film noir detective, except wearing fishnet stockings, of course.
“What’s been keeping you at home?” I ask eventually.
“You know. The old problem.”
The name Ras Algethi sits uncomfortably between us. I have a brief flash of the Hell Gate Bridge covered in ice and my teenage daughter slumped on the edge of defeat.
“Jesus,” I remark. “You haven’t got a handle on that yet?”
“Jeez, Zeph. What about you? How’s the new team going?” Twilight fires back with the same kind of expectant irony I have come to forget.
Clearly allowing an alien god free on the prime material plane has left Twilight a bit tetchy.
“Well, um. . . .”
“Not exactly settin’ the world on fire like I expected, you and these Sentinels,” he says.
“Yeah, well my head’s not really been into it.”
“No?”
“My . . . mum . . . died . . . I think.”
The handsome grey-clad devil opens his mouth and closes it again. When he puts his suede gauntlet over my hand I snatch it away.
“For fuck’s sake, Twilight. . . .”
“Oh what, too gay for ya?”
“Jesus. Just a bit.”
“Oh well excuse me,” Twilight says with a self-deprecatory laugh. “And h
ere was me thinking we’d sorta moved on. You don’t get it, do you, ya big lug? I’m about as gay for you as I am for Jenna McCarthy.”
“Still. . . .”
“Hey, you’re a handsome guy. I’ve told you that before. But really I’m only into you when I’m, you know, someone else. Projecting.”
“As a woman,” I say.
“As a woman,” he repeats.
“It’s still . . . a bit crazy.”
“Sheesh. Comin’ from the guy who plays with lightning bolts for a living?”
The drinks come and we toast with a tap like we always used to, as if we haven’t even just had this conversation. Twilight grins a tad and then the expression erases.
“I’m sorry to hear about your mother.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And I’m sorry to hear about your ongoing demon problems.”
“Demon?”
“Uh, you know, the living star guy. . . .”
“Oh,” Twilight says. “Him. Yeah. Well, funny thing about that. . . .”
But I cut him off, ploughing into a stream-of-consciousness account of what’s happened in my private life that would read like a Tim Powers novel if only it had a good editor. Instead, my story comes across like the garbled confessional it is. I explain the John Lennon thing, my possibly evil time-travelling half-brother Julian, the Yoko Ono/Maxine connection, and even the island. And I really can’t explain why this urge to come clean always hits me with Twilight, of all the people. It’s like there is a comfort and objectivity in his grey demeanor. I feel at least I can expect his reaction to be genuine, however unpalatable it might be.
When I look up from the bottle I’ve been cradling – it’s gone warm now in my awkward grasp – my pal the anti-hero is staring at me with a mix of shellshock and dread.
“Christ, I need another drink,” he says.
He holds up two fingers and a blonde with Aphrodite’s cleavage quickly brings another pair of Stolis.
“Only cure I’ve ever known for a fuck-storm like that is to go on a bender, buddy,” Twilight says.
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