After this, I am up and over the bar as Morales spits teeth and his black, beady eyes dart around and I pluck the street sweeper from his mitts and throw it to Loren, who coolly starts ejecting shells from the slide.
I lift the dealer by his shirt and feel buttons and his gold chain pop.
“Is this everything, Frank?”
“Wh-who the fuck are you?” the dealer splutters.
I smile in an unpleasant way and let him fall back now I know he’s unarmed. Then, still smiling, I slide the baseball bat from its saddle upside-down on my back.
“I’m the Devil’s Advocate, motherfucker.”
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.
*
IT IS MONDAY, they tell me.
I only have the Friday paper, my torso taped from hips to nips, to guide my admittedly decreased interest in world affairs. I can’t even summon much venom for Paragon and Jocelyn, who have postponed their wedding as a mark of respect to the thousands dead from the recent worldquake tragedy, though Sal Doro from the Post has it that their venue of choice lost its chapel during the tremors and they’re waiting on a six-to-eight week rebuild. It’s front page in a city home to forty million people, with famine, flood and pestilence afoot as usual on their dark missions in the rest of the world.
Then again, I usually start with the sports pages.
There are magazines, though, and the Internet, but apart from the pain of sitting upright, I find myself without much appetite for the online world. Like the letters now opened beside my cot in the Wallachian fortress that has become my hospital and which I know I must soon depart, there’s little solace in what news it can bring.
I’ve missed Christmas, in my convalescence.
Although every muscle in my body aches, there is not ten minutes that go by where I don’t hesitantly flex and try to summon even a hint of my former powers. They are as good as gone forever, for all I know. Me, who craved so badly for life just a few days before, now lies listlessly upon the sheets that might as well be my grave for all the enthusiasm I bring to their occupation.
There is a darkness here, and not just in the momentary flashbacks to whatever black science the Wallachian monks used to stabilize my internal bleeding and save me from a brain dead coma. It’s like someone’s flicked a switch and thrown my world into shades of grey, an actualization of a depression from which, like depression itself, I have absolutely no power to lift myself.
Loren comes, inserting herself hesitantly into one of those moments where I am paying so little attention to things I might as well be dead for all the difference it would make, and suddenly there she is smelling of blossom and shampoo and womanhood and she kneels beside the bed in her new maroon leather duds, only the inexpressible delicacy of her cleavage able to rouse me from my yawnsome inner torpor.
“How are you?” she asks. “Are they . . . are you any better?”
“No, babe,” I reply and sigh and think about turning away except for all the effort it would require. “There’s no sign of them.”
“I was asking how you were,” she gently chides. “I’m interested in you, not your powers, Joe.”
“Don’t kid me, Loren. I’m worried about them too. Jesus. What are the others saying?”
We don’t even touch on her missing powers. They are gone for good and she seems happier for it.
Loren says nothing for a while and simply strokes my brow. It’s like the best sponge bath, yet for all that I just wish she’d just stop and speak. Something of the tightening of my brows tells her that.
“Smidgeon’s in a coma,” she says at last. “Mastodon’s out of surgery and should be fine. No one knows anything about his powers. Manticore says his are still out. I guess he’s being brave, you know, not saying anything, but you know what we’re all thinking.”
“I don’t know what that bitch hit us with,” I say, far too wistful for my own liking, my voice with a faraway quality I wish I could blame on the drugs.
Loren stands and fusses with something. I scan her new costume again and despite everything, it’s hard to repress a smile.
“Any sign of Vulcana?” I ask.
“No.”
“So where’s the katana?”
She turns, the playfulness of her girl persona evident without the Lioness mask. The two nightsticks in their holsters across her bare back click gently together as her tawny mane swishes in the antiseptic gloom.
“I told you I’d probably kill myself with one of those.”
“You could do me a favor and kill me at the same time,” I remark. “I don’t suppose I could survive being stabbed if what the monks say is true about my metabolism.”
“What did they say?”
“Like I guessed before,” I tell her. “Without powers, it’s still left me with thicker bones, wind resistance, heightened musculature, but that just puts me at the upper end of the human spectrum. After those moves that fucking asswipe Nightwind pulled on me, it shows my speed’s shot. If anything, I’m slower than I should be because I’m so damned heavy.”
Loren’s face darkens and I know it’s the reference to my attacker rather than my ebullient potty mouth.
“They told me,” she hesitates, meaning the monks were gossiping again. “They told me he was your brother?”
“Honey, what I don’t know about my family could fill a cookbook,” I answer. “One of these days I may bore you with the whole ordeal. Who knows, it might help me get it straight in my own head.”
“He’s been sleeping with Vulcana,” Loren says. “That’s why he was here. Connie acts like he’s just some hanger-on in the daytime, but Brasseye says he’s been coming in, on and off, for more than a week.”
“It’s all just to get at me, I’m guessing,” I say. “But Connie hasn’t been right since her arm came off and you can’t tell me you haven’t noticed it. There’s something not right about these kooks you hang out with, Loren, and I don’t mean the guys with their underpants outside their tights.”
“Yeah, well, these ‘kooks’ and I won’t have much to do with each other soon,” she says.
I give an inquiring look, but say nothing, passingly aware I am sitting up and have my legs dangling now over the edge of the bed. A positive sign, a doctor in a parallel universe might call it.
“I’m not Seeker any more, Joe. They’ve already brought the new girl in.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. There’s a few things I have to show her, but after that, I guess I’m out.”
“But you’re, what is it, Lioness, now?”
“I really don’t know about that,” she says and looks sadly away. “I did it for you, but I think the Sentinels . . . I think it’s gonna be a while. . . .”
“Shit,” I say slowly and find myself watching her porcelain profile, her perfectly upturned nose. “So you’re in the same boat as me after all.”
Zephyr 7.2 “Anxious, Wounded, Hopeful”
IT IS MIDNIGHT inside the clockwork fortress.
I have read the letter three times and can’t quite bring myself to put it down. Of all the rich and varied things in my life to consider surreal, the half-dozen jaggedly typed lines somehow beat them all.
Back in the day, I used to tell the other masks I was a writer in my day job. I had the couch and the stubble and the late sleeping and the finicky attachment to words that comes with the territory and for a while there, probably just before Beth gave up trying to encourage me out of the doldrums and to stop mooching on her, I set myself some tasks, cleaned up my portfolio and put a few freelance submissions out there. I was more like a well-read guy without any real ideas of my own than a bona fide prospective author – God knows, there are no half-finished manuscripts apart from the disaster we no longer talk about that was the Zephyr: The Motion Picture screenplay – and pretty soon this reality came back to bite me on the end in rejection letter after letter after email after straight out slap in the face.
In this world at least, a guy who can
channel lightning, beat the speed of sound and ignore bullets has more direct ways of establishing self-worth and it wasn’t long before I put the whole writer thing back into the perspective it deserved, as a handy cover story for when my fellow costumed nuts and I were knocking back cocktails at Gliders and divulging candid fictions about ourselves and each other.
Only the letter in my hand now tells a different story.
Dear Joseph, the cockhead editor writes. First, you’ll have to excuse my extreme unprofessionalism. It seems one of our old mail bags was misplaced by an intern when we were moving into our offices about three years ago. Your piece on the Yankees was in there, but I’ve got to say I am still impressed. It holds up pretty good even after all this time, though maybe that says more about the state of baseball at the moment than anything else. I would be interested in any other pieces you might have about our great American game, along similar lines to your submission and mixing observations about our city’s caped crusaders with today’s league players and pithy insights about current affairs and the latest game results as you have in this piece. If you could show you were able to stitch these together pretty regularly, we could maybe talk about a column. Apologies, but I couldn’t find an email address on your CV. Please call me ASAP to discuss.
Fucker. Come along and throw my life into chaos by suggesting a perfectly reasonable line of work?
My hands shake. I put the letter next to the steel pitcher and take a sip from a mug that shows a cartoon of ex-President Jeb Bush smiling and hugging one of the aliens from Predator.
It’s not enough to say the letter knocks my equilibrium. Even for a writer, it’s hard to put into words the feeling, the sheer unconscious weight of significance attached to such acknowledgment, an external validation of your worth as a person all quite ludicrously wrapped up in some lottery where one, randomly-produced syntagmatic burst of creativity lands miraculously in front of the very right, most highly subjective pair of eyes you need and there’s a synergy, an acceptance, where on so many other occasions there would be nothing. I am a guy who made a name for himself by not revealing my name, by performing feats I can only acknowledge with a mask over my face and a quick getaway up my sleeve. Who would think it was even credible to be literally close to bulletproof and yet so fucking vulnerable?
I fold the paper away, calmer for the half-dozen tears I disavow and whose origins I can’t really explain, so many factors rife at present that picking one is like firing an arrow into a crowd of pedophiles.
All I can say is that a good whiff of pathos is like nature’s own sedative. I turn over on the bed and pull the cover to my chin and only wince briefly as my ribs flare and within minutes I am stumbling through the white mist of my own sleepytime imaginings for the moment pleasantly free and untroubled.
*
THE PURPLE GUY with the Mohawk takes me by surprise as I step into the ready room. He takes one look at me and drinks in the jeans and stained t-shirt and gives a subtle double-take at the domino mask I felt too naked to appear without.
“Uh, who are you?” he asks.
“I should ask you the same thing.”
“Stormhawk. I’m Stormhawk. Smidgeon asked me to come.”
“Smidgeon’s awake?”
“Awake?” He tilts his head at me.
“Sorry, I’ve been out of the loop. I’m Zephyr. I heard Smidge was in a coma.”
“That was a couple of days ago,” Stormhawk replies.
He can’t quite keep the tone from his voice that tells me my name’s been discussed in bitchy circles.
“He’s up and about now. Actually, uh, I’m meant to be here for an interview for the team.”
Stormhawk wears a face mask despite the purple skin and whitish hair-do. His costume is dark blue and purple and he has an elaborate-looking plum-colored cloak that makes me think he’s never been smacked around much. He looks at me expectantly and I smile, faux clueless, and shrug as I move around toward the magic table.
“Don’t mind me.”
Before he can offer any rejoinder, Loren and Smidgeon walk into the room with two black-hooded Wallachians and a skinny blonde girl in the white costume Loren made famous as Seeker. Now it’s my turn for a double-take. And as I look at the girl, she looks away like the innocent gazelle she must be, her hair in untidy curls masking her face and concealing for a heartbeat the residual glow that is Seeker’s trademark. My eyes flick to Loren and she stares back at me with an anxious, wounded, hopeful kind of expression. I try to smile for her sake and fail, managing at best an impotent leer, and then Smidgeon resumes talking as if none of us were here at all.
“This is the ready room. It’s crammed full of some pretty amazing technology from parallel universes,” he says and barely glances at me and gestures to Stormhawk, who stands along one of the back rows where monitors on white stone shelves glimmer with footage from a dozen different viewpoints.
This is not so much a recruitment speech as a sales pitch, because the girl doesn’t realize she holds the keys to the castle. Without her on board, the New Sentinels, version two-point-fucking-oh, have no magic time-travelling super fortress to house them and cart them around.
“Seeker, this is Stormhawk,” Smidgeon says and motions to the purple guy like he’s introducing a particularly frightening uncle.
“Hey. Pleased to meetcha.”
“Hi,” the new Seeker replies in a tiny voice. “I’m Candace.”
“Oh, don’t tell anyone your name, honey,” Loren says and puts her hand on the skinny girl’s shoulders, and I swear to God, it’s just curiosity that makes me check out the new girl’s little boobies at that moment and also just the same brand of bad luck that Loren looks back and finds me doing it.
“Um, hi. I’m Zephyr.”
I smile wryly and the girl looks startled to actually meet someone famous and then looks confused by the t-shirt and jeans.
“I’m in stealth mode,” I tell her and wink.
I think Candace gets it, but Smidgeon’s narrow face closes down even further and he shepherds her away before anything else can be said.
“Don’t worry about him, Seeker. Zephyr’s also lost his powers. Like me. In fact, we can thank him for this predicament.”
“Jesus, you wanted some action,” I heckle at Smidgeon’s back.
He glares back over his shoulder. It only strikes me for the first time at that moment that he feels somehow jilted, something waspish and nasty in his expression even with the goggles sewn into his blue head-mask. I shrug and he sneers and makes like even acknowledging me makes him feel sick and then its Loren also looking back at me with a strained and uncomfortable expression and then they are headed out the room.
“Jeez, what was that all about?” Stormhawk asks once they’re gone.
“Smidgeon’s just got his panties in a knot. Don’t worry about it.”
Stormhawk harrumphs and says, “He told me what you did, you know. It’s not cool.”
I look at the guy and scowl and eye the table, which appears to be showing footage from the parallel universes where I do actually batter this guy to death at this moment.
“Right,” I snap. “And what did he tell you?”
“Man, you . . . you banged the Seeker, man. And then you radioed in for help when it was a trap and everyone got rolled and lost their powers.”
I am about to mount a spirited defense to these unwelcome charges when I do that rare thing people only sometimes do at the start of an argument and actually ask myself whether the accusation isn’t on the money. I most certainly did, sort of accidentally-on-purpose, rob this dimension of its anointed spiritual guardian. And like Smidgeon and the other fucktards I’ve most recently called my teammates, I didn’t foresee the Hawaiian luau that the Demoness – or should I say Spectra – had planned for me in Tokyo.
I close my mouth and the glass table goes black and I shake my head and mutter something about returning some videos and leave the room.
*
; I PAY THE cab driver and step from the curb where an on-site toilet, a concrete mixer and some scaffolding mark the last resting place of my childhood home.
I am wearing Mastodon’s Kucera aviator sunglasses, acid wash jeans, a Taxi Driver-style green anorak and a pair of dirty brown Australian work boots. Over the other side of the construction site, Rebecca Mollins, last known neighbor to my deceased parents, stands by her glistening black SUV and eyes me suspiciously, too new herself to understand I grew up a little boy here. I give a neighborly wave and trudge up the drive stained with concrete dust from the site works, the foundations a giant L-shape on the ground with pipes and sheaths for cables exposed to the cold afternoon sun, a few disinterested workmen earning an honest wage waving cigarettes at ongoing conundrums.
Mike is the foreman I have reluctantly agreed to meet after apparently leaving him far too long in the dark about my precise plans for the house. I thought I made it pretty simple, providing some pictures of the house that used to be there and asking him to put it back. But apparently not. It turns out Mike is a perfectionist and he has enough questions to crash Wikipedia.
So we discuss fine details: the guttering here, the step up into the hallway there. I am distracted by the newspaper Mike keeps leaning his elbows on, something about the Sentinels and a headshot of me above an item about Norwegian musicians dead in a church siege. Sometime in the middle of our discussion over coffee generously supplied from his thermos, Mike is tapping the loose tobacco from the end of a cigarette when he remembers something and he pulls an old Polaroid from a work file and passes it to me.
“One of the boys found it near the fence,” he says. “Can’t have been here too long, since we had that bad rain a few weeks back.”
The photo is of my mum – Georgia, dead now these few weeks – and a guy in a leather jacket with the collar turned up, smoking, a dirty flick of oily hair the most prominent thing to his profile. They are young, or at least Georgia is, and I turn the photo over hoping for a useful notation, but there is nothing. She is as young as I think I’ve ever seen her, but not in costume, really quite unbelievably gorgeous in that Irish milkmaid way of hers I only now uncomfortably realize has been a thing of mine half my life, Elisabeth an O’Shaunnessy before I married her, a curly-haired variant on the usual fair-skinned, dark-haired formula.
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