Paragon nods and smiles and pats me on the shoulder.
“Thanks for that, man. You’re the best.”
“I hope you get cancer and a donkey rapes you at your funeral,” I say.
“Awesome. What’s this song called?”
I stare at the grinning, gently glowing costume for a couple more seconds and mutter something about “zombie cocks” and he nods like a goofy Dutchman and tries to high five me and I turn and push past Eric Estrada and Rafael Nadal and descend the velvety black stairs to the foyer of the club where a few skinny blondes in short silver dresses are chain-smoking and shivering and the air feels like the inside of a meat locker and I think for a moment they are all craning their necks up at the security monitors to check out how things are going in the club, but instead they are calmly watching Japanese schoolgirls being pack-raped by demon octopuses and ghosts and Pokémon and old men in pin-striped suits and I cadge a smoke and cough lightly as I fire one up and pull into a recess and watch the view down yet more steps to the street.
If the Feebs start investigating my family history then the entire universe could well unravel. Without my powers I’m as useless as tits on a bull, but there are others out there in the night who might be able to help me at least until I work out what the hell I am doing. Loren has made hints about me having to leave the citadel and Tessa hasn’t returned any of my calls and more than once I have found myself trying to see if I could still remember my wife’s cell number off by heart and sadly realize it’s a no-brainer. I have to keep Zephyr’s latest developments under wraps, and outing the man who helped kill my mother to the FBI isn’t going to do me any favors with that.
Tracking down this Seagal character will lead to Ono, and that’s the last thing I need the Feds to do, because then they’ll have a chance of discovering what I now know as well: my father the Preacher Man was a member of The Twelve too, and for one reason or another, he didn’t disappear when the others agreed to dissolve themselves into the multiverse, which can only mean one thing.
This is all part of some bigger, even more elaborate plan.
Zephyr 7.5 “Vertically Challenged”
I SLEEP TO about one in the afternoon and put the Zephyr phone on silent and note a message from Loren asking me to meet her downtown, and after I shower and change into street civvies, I step out of the fortress near the D-Rail on Washington Avenue and choke back a quick double-shot frappuccino on the run and dodge traffic as I scurry across the road and join a crowd pouring onto the platform of the sky-rail and I am so hungry for a moment I wonder if this means my powers could be coming back, but for all my butt and finger flexing they’re still a no-show. I buy a gyro and catch the next train for Jackson and head over the walkway to the chromatic spires that house Hallory O’Hagan’s offices.
It takes a while to wrangle an appointment from the secretary, given I refuse to tell her my name, but the slinky redhead herself appears before the security guys can arrive and I grab her by the arm of her strangely metallic suit and steer her into an empty conference room.
“It’s me. Zephyr. Chill out.”
“Zephyr?”
She looks at me with much the same expression I’d expect of a woman who thinks she’s been taken hostage by a madman and lifts her secretarial eye-glasses with her free hand and peers at me and frowns and I frown back and can’t believe I have to put my fingers across her eyes to make her realize I am telling the truth.
“Really? Is that you?”
“I could kiss you if that would help.”
“No, I’m convinced. What’s going on? Where’s your costume?”
“It’s wash day,” I tell her and let go her shoulder as the conference room doors burst open and Hallory dismisses the three angry-looking guys who rush in.
“Why didn’t you call if you wanted to make an appointment?” she asks.
“I have to keep a low profile. I couldn’t let anyone see me flying in here.”
“O-K,” she says slowly and checks her blouse and puts down the folder of blank paper she’s been carrying and retrieves her blackberry and checks it for messages, but it’s blank.
“Sorry for the confusion.”
“There must be something pretty urgent,” Hallory says.
“I need some money.”
My agent’s smile hardens so tangibly I almost expect cracks to spread across her face and her skin to fall off like unfired pottery and reveal some bizarre lizard beneath. Silence descends like some great invisible machine sucking the air and life from the room.
“Money,” she says with a vaguely Japanese accent.
“I just wanted to clear up where things are at,” I say. “I might need to take a break from, you know, the advertising world, the promotions and stuff for a little while because of, um, superhero business, you know, so I just thought we could tally up the account.”
“I’m not sure you’ve noticed I haven’t actually called you since the Burger King shoot fiasco,” Hallory says and pulls a dour turn.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The Cronenberg shoot,” she replies.
“I think you’re confusing me with someone else.”
“We lost a ten thousand dollar bond on that contract, Zephyr. There isn’t any money. In fact, you probably owe us money. I don’t think you can hang up your mask just yet.”
“I’m kind of . . . between paychecks at the moment.”
“I’m sure when we finalize the license deal on the Sentinels figurines we’ll all be breathing a little easier,” Hallory says and smiles as if to say she too is taking a personal pay cut at the moment.
“The Sentinels? Oh. Yeah.” Fuck.
“There’s no problems with that, are there?” she asks. “I mean, I read that piece in the Post this morning, but nobody believes what that guy writes.”
“Don’t they? Good.”
Hallory nails me with her piercing blue eyes and then ups the ante with the cutest frown any man has ever witnessed.
“You would tell me if there’s a problem, right Zeph?”
“Sure.”
Hallory picks up the folder and taps it on the edge of the conference table to make the sheaves line up.
“So we’re good? I’ve got to get these contracts down to the lawyers like yesterday.”
She smiles and pats my arm and doesn’t at all resemble the woman who joined me for a little tonsil hockey on the night of the team launch as she leaves me standing in the big room, yet another conference room and yet another disaster.
As I don’t have money for a cab, I head back down the elevator and through the huge atrium in the bottom of the skyscraper and head out among the pre-zombified hordes as the sun sinks past its zenith and my phone pulses and Loren is asking Where r u? for the second time.
*
WE MEET AT the café in the building where U2 did that gig on the roof and there is enough memorabilia in the place to make the owners a small fortune on eBay. Nonetheless, they are still over-using the coffee grounds and my drink smells like an ashtray and Loren has hardly touched her hot chocolate or the cheesecake I bought her. Things feel about as romantic as the booth with the two old dudes in it from The Muppet Show. I slide the cheesecake back over to myself and pick up the fork for lack of anything else to say.
“I was going to eat that,” Loren says.
“Today?”
“It’s better at room temperature.”
“Sorry. I’m hungry.”
“You must be getting your appetite back,” she says and doesn’t meet my eye because we both know this is a dig about my lack of powers.
“Yeah,” I say without much sprightliness and stab the small fork into the edge of the dessert. “What’s going on at Dread Central?”
“We’ve got to talk about that.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say and chew for a moment. “My marching orders.”
“It’s not just you.”
“You too, huh?”
I stab
, chew, swallow, and when I move again, Loren’s still looking at me so I give a shrug.
“What?”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I have these guys rebuilding my, uh, family home, but apparently the costs and stuff, I’m about twenty grand short, which is about the same price as the roof, so. . . .”
“Short term?”
“Short term? Fuck. I don’t know. Really, in lots of ways, somewhere to sleep is like the last thing on my mind.”
“I know you’re really bummed about losing your powers.”
She reaches across and I am obliged to put down the fork and let her take my hand, her cool fingers massaging across the top of my callused knuckles.
I reply, “And I know it seems like you were never happier, losing yours.”
Loren smiles and tilts her head, a professional headshot, honey-drizzled wheat-colored hair spraying loose below the plait at her temple.
“Look what I got in return,” she says.
“Uh-huh. Yeah,” I say with barely mustered enthusiasm and wince as she squeezes my hand and then interlocks her fingers and leans earnestly on the table.
“I was thinking we could get a place together,” Loren says.
My hand pauses midway to the fork and my eyes remain on the gelatinous temptation of the half-eaten chocolate Bavarian.
“Um, yeah?”
“We have to look at the rest of our lives,” Loren says with growing energy. She’s not afraid to sound pre-rehearsed as she adds, “Your powers might well come back, but mine, we know they’re gone forever. I have to think about what I want to do and things I’ve never had to worry about before. Like money.”
She pulls that little sad face she sometimes uses and I sigh and drop the fork hard enough on the table that it clatters, dancing across the laminate leaving little creamy marks like an augury indicating some unseen and impossible future.
“You mean like a job?”
“I had a higher calling,” Loren says and, for a moment, reminds me of the remote and aloof beauty I had once thought it safe to desire. “I’m not sure how I recapture that without my powers, but that’s my challenge.”
“I wish I had half as much an idea about what to do as you,” I reply and almost startle myself with the honesty of the statement.
“I’ve circled a few places going cheap near the water in Van Buren.”
“Van Buren?”
My eyes widen of their own volition and I look down, remaining astonished as the newspaper comes down between us covered in small red circles.
“That’s like the one place even the Kirlians didn’t want to touch,” I remark.
“That joke’s pretty old, Joe,” Loren says in the voice she reserves for speaking to animals and retarded people. “Considering our budget, I think we’d be doing pretty well, and there are loft apartments overlooking the water.”
“The harbor.”
“Sure.”
She studies my face for signs and it turns into a staring match, me desperate to give away nothing and her changing the angle and squinting as she tries to sift my expression for clues.
“Got some time free tomorrow morning?”
*
I CALL TESSA again, but there’s no answer and then I look up sharply as the people around me gasp and point and some guy in blue with a cloak flies over fast and somewhere there is a muffled explosion and a few car alarms start up along the street and I bury my face in the raised collar of my anorak as the pedestrians chew their collective cud and I hurry along to the subway.
There is a pay phone in the subway and an actual honest-to-God directory hanging from a chain amid the graffiti and my percolating thoughts cohere at this exact moment and the fortune of the universe shines upon me in the shape of the quarter in my pocket and I dig through the pages of the book until I find the number I am looking for. Then the phone is ringing and again I am in luck.
How do you contact the Nightwatchman?
You call his mother.
“Mrs Rushbaum? Uh, my name’s Joe. I’m an old friend of Geoffrey’s. Is he around? Or do you know how I could find him?”
The old lady recites a mobile number and I mentally high-five myself and ignore my connecting train and pull out the Enercom phone as the station becomes deserted and I add the number to my address book and then dial it.
A voice, cold as the grave, answers on the fifth ring.
“Who is this?” he asks.
I swallow cautiously and glance around.
“Geoff, it’s me. Zephyr.”
“Joseph,” the Nightwatchman replies in his most unpleasant-sounding voice to date. “How are you? Not well, from what the Post is telling people.”
“Look, about that: we need to meet.”
“Do we?” my old contact replies. “I think perhaps it’s you who needs to meet me. You’ll find all the voices in my head are in agreement on that one.”
I sigh and lean my head against the cold dirty tiles of the wall and then jerk back as a couple of Asian tourists in legwarmers shuffle onto the platform and the sign chimes to show six minutes to the next arrival.
“Will you fucking meet with me or not?”
“Why of course, since you ask so charmingly,” the Nightwatchman says. “Are you free tonight? I’ll just be, you know, hanging around.”
“Fuck, Geoffrey. Were you this annoying in high school?”
“Worse,” the slightly lycanthropic voice replies. “I was on the homecoming committee, remember?”
“Yeah. Somehow I forgot that.”
“So, outside, or should I say, above one of these ridiculous little flesh bars you frequent?”
“I’m . . . a little vertically challenged at the moment,” I say in a pained voice.
“So there’s some truth to the rumors. . . .”
“What did Sal Doro say?”
“Oh it wasn’t Sal,” Geoffrey replies with a lightness that suggests he knows the old hack well. “It’s his junior scribe. Nate Simon?”
“What the hell does that guy know?”
“Well, I’ve always wondered,” the dark voice on the other end of the line pauses. “What exactly does Seeker taste like?”
Zephyr 7.6 “Six Ways To Fucking Sunday”
I STRUGGLE UP the platform near Jeremy Bentham Avenue muttering imprecations on the gods, the fates, the crowds, the simple shitty bad luck that has reduced me to the level of your average everyday homo commutis. The bulk of my fellow Atlanteans have elected to jack into the aural cyberspace of their iPods rather than confront the dismal reality around them, the newest and perhaps most grand city in the world already awash with disease, dirt and scum.
Homeless people dance like medieval jesters around a collection tin on the corner from the subway while a black lady with bandaged eyes bangs a tambourine. Few pause to watch, though the trickle of coins is steady even in a city where so many people desperately need to be somewhere else all the time.
A block from the train line, the shadows of the skyscrapers recant and some of the old Bohemian character of Boston’s college district manages to peek through the post-Kirlian rewrite, the buildings clustered European-style to four storeys and record shops and recycling boutiques and cafes and continental delicatessens and pawnbrokers and street artists define the street. Looming over the intersection is a billboard, I don’t know what it’s selling, the words DISAPPEAR HERE a promise and a threat.
With my hands stuffed in my pockets I could be any other madman talking to himself and contemplating violent acts except for the fact I was so recently a self-described hero. I pause at a newspaper display and the headline reads “Sentinels in disarray”. A mutant kid, only about eight or nine years old, but covered in grandpa stubble, hisses at me with a forked tongue as I start off again and almost stumble into his path. I’ve barely recovered from this when a blonde woman in a Versace overcoat steps from the lee of a nearby health food shop and affixes her sunglasses and almost instantly discl
oses her true identity.
“Holland!” I call without really thinking about it, and the gorgeous curvy blonde halts a moment and double-takes me as I hustle up the block towards her.
“Sorry, do I know you?” she asks.
“It is you, right?”
“What?”
“Holland?”
“Yeah,” she replies without perhaps all the confidence she could.
She removes her glasses and looks at me again with that universal calm most beautiful women manage quite naturally faced with a panting male.
“I’m, uh . . . It’s me. My name’s Joseph.”
“Joseph,” she repeats. “We’ve met before?”
“Yeah, but we were both wearing masks last time.”
A visible chill runs through her and her natural instinct is to scan the street for threats and exits, ready to grapple for either one.
“It’s OK,” I tell her. “I know more than you probably even do yourself. How’s the memory.”
“Are you . . . Zephyr?”
“I’m gonna neither confirm nor deny, you know what I’m saying?” I reply and grin and hope that’s enough for her.
“Gee whiz, this is crazy,” Holland says.
“Gee whiz?” I laugh, charmed, aware I’m like a puppy on heat. “People still use that phrase?”
“As much as I can remember,” Holland answers drily and motions for me to walk with her to where a very feminine green bicycle is chained to the metal guard around a street tree awash in cigarette butts.
“You live around here?”
“Mmm. Close by.”
“I’m not stalking you,” I say.
“I wonder why not?”
We both laugh. I glance along the street and identify a coffee shop and point off-handedly.
“Fancy a drink?”
The tall woman eyes the café and her expression remains frosty.
“I wouldn’t mind something a little stronger,” she says. “In fact, I wouldn’t mind something that could give me my life back. How about you?”
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