Zephyr II

by Warren Hately

  “Shit,” I mutter under my breath.

  “Family of yours?”

  “My ma,” I reply. My eyes sweep up. “I don’t know the guy, though.”

  “Reminds me of someone,” he says vaguely.

  I nod and he says something else I don’t really take in and I am picturing pouring electricity I can no longer conjure into my mother as she madly charges through the wall of our house, the blue flames dancing along the sleeves of her charred jumper, and I have to wait a bit before I can really speak properly, my face showing very little thanks to a lifetime’s practice being shallow, and Mike starts up with some more questions that are really just statements about fake vintage porcelain and I think of Maxine’s fixation with the items of the past, her 60s teapot collection a charnel ruin now, how I found boxes and boxes of the crap in the woodshed after I sold off Titanium Girl’s rocket car and gave them to Tessa to junk on eBay and perhaps something of my mood catches in the wind like a whiff of the cigarette smoke Mike won’t quite let himself light up and the words die in his throat as he looks at me, looking through the grimy panes of the transportable office, and then I thank him for his time and hear the Zephyr phone with its dubious ringtone ignored in my pocket and I bust out into the clear air again just in time for a light shower and there’s a beep and a reminder on my phone tells me I am late for an appointment I don’t remember making.

  Zephyr 7.3 “Lower Frequencies”

  THE MESSAGE FROM Synergy is so hesitant and incoherent that I have no idea what she’s on about. I walk, a dejected figure in the light rain, heading back to the main drag as the leafy streets give way to a homeless shelter and a needle exchange and a soup kitchen van and some big black women singing gospel at the corner under umbrellas salvaged from a recent sports event, seagulls wildly off their usual flight path hanging on the overhead telephone wires I realize probably should’ve been undergrounded years ago. Once I am on the street I find a small coffee shop, the phone to my ear, and order two full breakfasts and a jug of coffee out of habit and I only reconsider my order when the tired blonde behind the counter raises her pierced eyebrow at me, rightly dubious of my ability to pay, let alone my appetite, and I ask for just the coffee and some eggs and doubt I’ll even eat them as I move to a back booth and slide onto the cracked orange vinyl seat and the Federal agent answers her phone.

  “It’s me,” I say without much enthusiasm. “Zephyr.”

  “Zephyr. Thanks for returning my call.”

  “Sounds like you had something to say, but I’m not quite sure what it was.”

  “Sorry about that,” Synergy says, as if being incoherent is just part of the job. “It’s a madhouse around here. We need to talk.”

  “We’re talking.”

  “No. You need . . . I need you to come in,” she says.

  I wince.

  “That might not be as easy as it sounds. What’s going on?”

  “There’s been a. . . .”

  “Development?”

  “Not quite,” Synergy says, sounding vague again. “Um, I’m really not sure how to explain.”

  “Try.”

  “Look,” the agent says with an audible groan. I sense her fussing with the distractions on her desk. “This doesn’t come down to me, OK?”

  “You’re giving me a bad feeling,” I tell her.

  “You really need to come in. There’s a . . . videotape.”

  “Footage?”

  “No. A videotape.”

  A dozen scenarios run through my mind, wondering how I can take to the costume again when I can’t even fly. Zephyr arriving in a taxicab: it just won’t wash. Any nut-job could spot me and I’d be toast.

  “I’m in the middle of something delicate,” I say and don’t even sound convincing to myself. “Can we meet somewhere private? I need to keep my head down.”

  “Ah, so the police have caught up with you?” Synergy asks.

  “What?”

  “Where do you want to meet?”

  So I tell her.

  *

  I ONCE TOLD Red Monolith the strobe lights at the Flyaway were a secret defense system against vampires. Poor bastard. The UV lights make Synergy’s costume a shimmering illusion against the suggestion of her taut, sinewy body, her teeth and her heavily underlined eyes glowing as she sees me across the other side of the carpeted chamber and lifts the gauzy toga worn above her body stocking to step down more safely, high heels on her white leather boots, a vague expression of frustration otherwise marring her perfect Ethiopian goddess outlook.

  Without planning it, I am with Paragon, Portal, Cipher and some guy called Lark, or The Lark, or maybe I’m just mishearing things, his costume a black cowl and cape, snug leather like mine, designer stubble on the chin jutting from beneath his mask. There are no girls with us except for Brittany Murphy and a friend, both of them completely bombed and sitting at the end of the semicircular booth a short distance away from us. Also in the club tonight are Lynyrd Skynyrd, Robert Pattison, Robert Patrick, Tera Patrick, Patrick Stewart, Stuart Copeland, Alison Moyet, Boy George, Eddie Murphy, an Icelandic comedian named Gunnar Gunnarsson, Yuri Geller, this year’s Playmate of the Year and some Arab dudes who have booked out the back rooms, much to our chagrin, with some Saudi prince called bin-Laden smiling and shaking hands and doling out hundred dollar bills to people in the club like we’re all potential lap-dancers or something. I manage to bag three of them and find two more discarded on the floor.

  Synergy has a shoulder bag and she clutches it to her side like a nervous date, chewing on her bottom lip a moment as I stand and she eyes the other masks and suddenly I feel like I brought along the high school basketball team to meet her.

  “Um, sorry,” I say, leaning forward to be heard over the insistent pulse of a jungle remix of the latest Marilyn hit. “Trying to keep a low profile.”

  “Who are these damned people?” I think she replies, but after a moment’s confusion and my remark about not really knowing Lark or Portal or Brittany Murphy and her friend, I realize Synergy actually said, “You call this a low profile?” and I laugh and try to be genial even though I feel so uncomfortably vulnerable, like a little kid dressed up as a superhero rather than someone with a genuine claim to fame.

  “Did you bring the video?” I ask and she nods and I guide her by the elbow up the back of the room and through one of the concealed velvet doors.

  Behind, away from the crowd, there is a narrow plywood corridor painted black in lazy brushstrokes up to the first turn and then the music becomes more muted and we are in a narrow walkway like on a building site with naked scaffolding and the plank floor flexing beneath our weight and I gesture for Synergy to follow me into the security office where a guy called Dale takes one of my c-notes and disappears, leaving us alone with a bank of monitors and computer hard drives, and in the corner, one of the old security tape VCRs used earlier last decade.

  Synergy looks around like she’s yet to make a final decision and then she huffs and nods and digs into her bag, shaking her head like a disapproving big sister or something as she produces the clunky black cassette.

  “OK. I can’t really say I like this very much, but you have a right to see this I guess, though I am showing this to you as an affected family member and not because you’re part of the investigation. Do you understand that?”

  “It’s off-the-record,” I say. “I get it.”

  She blows a curlicue of copper-colored hair from her brow and looks about to say something derisive before she simply hands over the cassette instead and we breathe new life into the technology of what seems like an ancient civilization. The vertical scroll backs off a moment and a narrow-faced, grey-haired guy leaps into poor quality black-and-white on the monitor.

  “Isn’t that the dead guy, Hilfiger?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How old is this tape?”

  “Nearly five years.”

  “Fucking hell. What’s going on?”

  “Turn it up,” s
he says.

  “Jesus,” I say with an astonishment I am not really completely feeling. “What is this?”

  I dial up the volume and the audio isn’t great, especially with the lower frequencies eaten up by the inescapable reverberations of the nightclub.

  “. . . and that’s why you have to believe me. . . .”

  “I can barely hear this,” I stammer. “What the fuck is this, Syn?”

  “Thomas Hilfiger walked into a station house in Johnson in February ’04, asking to speak to some detectives about an unsolved murder upstate.”

  “Was there a murder?”

  “Y-yeah,” the agent replies, the hesitation enough to get my attention so that I turn my face from the monitor to her and squeeze my eyebrows together and Synergy looks flustered and turns away.

  “What is it?” I growl quietly. “Jesus, woman. Can’t you trust me by now?”

  “You’ve got to understand, Zephyr, I thought someone else would check the files. You know, cross-reference your mother’s death against similar MOs.”

  “Are you telling me that didn’t happen?”

  “Hilfiger alerted state troopers to a house fire in Maine, a writer who was dead there. Burnt alive. No visible source to the blaze.”

  “Shit.”

  “Unfortunately, he also floated the biggest cock-and-bull story local authorities have probably ever heard and no one could corroborate anything except that Hilfiger himself had a watertight alibi. He was in Copenhagen negotiating a deal at the time. A big, high-flying businessman like him, no one could really imagine he was involved except he knew these details no one was able to refute. He was referred to mental health services for assessment and I can tell you, they only realize now he sort of dropped off the system and the police investigation focused on the neighbors of the dead man and couldn’t find much in the way of forensic evidence and it kind of went nowhere from there.

  “It’s still an open case,” Synergy says and finally drops her gaze, depleted.

  I’m angry. I can feel that, though it is a distant sensation, like knowing somewhere the weather’s turned bad. I wonder, and not for the first time, maybe Beth was right all along and maybe with my powers gone I have half a chance at a normal life without my blood sugars and endorphins and circadian rhythms and all that shit in constant flux, though this occurs to me without any real joy. I keep my voice measured, calm.

  “So what was the story?”

  Zephyr 7.4 “Abroad In The Multiverse”

  AS SYNERGY TELLS it, even I have to concede the detectives had pretty good grounds to declare Hilfiger insane. It doesn’t do much to mitigate my bad feelings. The cops fucked up on this and now so have the Feds.

  Hilfiger told them he and a bunch of other middle-aged dudes used to be superheroes in an alternate reality until they decided they had become part of the problem rather than the solution for the world’s woes.

  “We hung up our capes. Like, forever. But that wasn’t enough,” he told the scowling officers on a winter’s night five years ago.

  They were called The Twelve. And they concocted a scheme where they would somehow collapse their reality into that of another parallel where they had all led wildly successful, but otherwise completely ordinary lives. And when it was done they’d have no memory of their past and the world would no longer suffer for what had become their tyrannical reign.

  “Suffice to say, the cops didn’t buy it,” Synergy says and she takes the short stroll around the control room and turns and I examine her fine butt as she selects a fresh place to rest it up against the computer consoles and then I fold my arms cross my heavy-feeling chest.

  “This is fucking unbelievable,” I say aloud.

  “His story?”

  “The fact you guys fucking missed this,” I remark.

  Synergy exhales with genuine grief and I can’t say anything else. I stare back at the tape, now frozen at the end of Hilfiger’s lengthy diatribe.

  He didn’t understand it himself, but he’d always been able to remember snatches of his adventurous other life even if his fellow costumes couldn’t. Some he tried to contact – the names are just laughable, Bryant Gumbel, David Suzuki, only adding to the cops’ easy disbelief – and reasonably enough his so-called former teammates thought he was just some addled crazy, regardless of his personal wealth, and if it wasn’t for the fact he was a powerful man now in his own right with a fleet of expensive lawyers, perhaps they could’ve made more trouble for him, turning up at their holiday homes and their workplaces and setting up high profile meetings under what seemed like utterly false pretenses.

  The first five people couldn’t remember and so he set about trying to find evidence to show them what he was saying was true. I am guessing that’s what the museum under the staircase was about, though how he went about collecting the bric-a-brac from other parallels where proof remained The Twelve ever existed, I have no fucking idea. The fact is, he obviously managed to accumulate enough proof when he went to New England and confronted the sixth team member about it – author Stephen King, aka Darkbane – because the writer flipped his wig completely and was dead within a week. All Hilfiger could tell the police was the modus operandi fit his old teammate Arsenal perfectly, though this meant someone else had also been abroad in the multiverse and brought back Arsenal’s gauntlets and powered armor.

  Hilfiger didn’t know Arsenal’s secret identity. And I can’t help but muse that if the story’s true, for one reason or another the ex-hero turned killer must’ve scored a bad deal in the whole crossover, because no-one’s ever heard of some two-bit deputy sheriff and Japanophile named Steven Seagal.

  “And now Hilfiger’s dead,” I say eventually.

  “Yeah,” Synergy says. “I’m sorry.”

  “You say that like I knew the guy. I didn’t.”

  “No,” she replies slowly. “But first your mother and now him. It’s got me wondering what’s happened now, five years after the fact, for this Arsenal guy to start killing again.”

  “He’s covering up for the big secret,” I reply. “If it’s all true, you know, the story of The Twelve.”

  “We’re going to have to interview those people,” Synergy says.

  I go back over the list in my head and whistle.

  “You kick this off and this guy, Arsenal, he’s gonna know the secret didn’t die with Tommy Hilfiger. It gives him grounds to start killing again.”

  “Yes,” Synergy says and meets my eye. “And the FBI has no idea who he is.”

  I nod and cough gently and look back at the frozen monitor and the moment to play my hand passes quietly unnoticed as Synergy checks her ‘fro and when I glance back, she is picking something from the corner of her lipstick and doesn’t see me admiring her profile with my uncertain expression.

  I’m damned if I know what to do.

  *

  SYNERGY RELUCTANTLY AGREES to give me twenty-four hours to think things through and I guess by wringing that concession from her I kind of show my hand a little. As we let ourselves back into the club, she looks at me with an expression of blatant incomprehension when I ask if she wants to dance. The new duet between KD Lang and Terence Trent d’Arby is playing at the sort of volume normally reserved for planes taking off and it’s been mashed up with hard Japanese electro and violent hentai cartoons are playing on all the monitors that line the dance floor and girls and boys and various other hardbodies grind away while enormous anime tentacles punch their way into big bosomed, big eyed characters in schoolgirl uniforms and sailor suits and maid costumes.

  “I don’t know what you’re playing at Zephyr, but I know you’re holding out on me,” Synergy has to practically yell into my ear and even then it takes three times to understand what she’s saying.

  “I just need time to think,” I bawl back at her.

  “No, I don’t want a god-damned drink,” Synergy replies.

  I sigh and tut and the handsome FBI agent adds, “You know I could get a warrant for everything be
hind your eyes under the Mirror Act,” and she waves a manicured finger at me and waits until I have acknowledged what she’s saying with a dip of my half-heartedly lustful gaze.

  “Yeah, whatever,” I say in return. “You can bring Siren down here to try and bust my skull, but you won’t get anything.”

  “You can say that again,” Synergy replies.

  We leave it on that note and the new song by Milli Vanilli comes on and I have to push through another rush of teenage models to get away from the dance floor. I am not a big fan of the duo’s decision to start incorporating Satanic imagery into their lyrics, and this along with the gradual slide that has made the German group’s live shows little more than a hard-core bondage cabaret leave me questioning some of the statements I made in the late 90s about them being the most significant contribution to popular music since Duran Duran. We live and learn.

  “Hey Zephyr,” Paragon practically bites my ear saying. “Are you coming to the opening party for the new Harrison Ford movie at Silver City?”

  “I don’t think so, Para, sorry.”

  “Twilight’s going to be there,” Paragon says and perhaps I imagine the wink.

  “That’s great.”

  “Are you still coming to the wedding?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “Are you still actually getting married?”

  “Of course,” Paragon replies. “Jocelyn’s getting along now. She’s more than seven months. I have to make an honest woman out of her before then.”

  “If you can make an honest woman out of her then I will personally buy you a fucking unicorn for a wedding present,” I shout back at him half-heartedly.