Zephyr II

by Warren Hately

  *

  DAMNED IF I know why, but I end up telling her the whole thing. The woman doesn’t even know her surname, yet she nods and sips a G&T and then a European beer as I lay out the quagmire my life’s become. In turn, she tells me how she’s working for cash wages in a gay and lesbian bookshop since she can’t even establish a social security number or find anything about her bank accounts.

  “You haven’t just tried, like, handing yourself in at a police station and asking for their help to identify you?” I ask and nod to her offer of another beer, since she’s paying.

  “And wind up where?” Holland asks. “Committed to an institution of some kind? As far as I can tell there’s nothing wrong with me except I can’t remember a damned thing about my life before the time I crawled out of the bricks at Twilight’s place.”

  I nod, pausing slightly and unwilling to comment on anything else she might be thinking. Into that gap she speaks again, dropping her voice low.

  “And then of course there’s that other thing.”

  She directs my gaze under the table to where one hand begins to sparkle with an ethereal light. Just as quickly, the brightness dissolves into an inky darkness that seems to creep up her wrist like liquid night.

  “What do you, uh, do?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure what you call it,” she says, keeping the intimate tone. And she smiles briefly, though like her no-longer-green hair, it is pale in the dingy light of the bar. “You’ve got to remember that along with my twenty-five years or so, I’m pretty ignorant about the whole superhero thing as well.”

  I nearly make some quip about my daughter, but wolf back the words and say something simpering and treacherous about “the calling” to dress up in a cape and lurid pants.

  “I had some memory,” she says and looks off into the middle distance. “And when I tried to remember, suddenly I was standing there wearing this . . . costume . . . designed by pornographers, I think, and my hair was green and I could fly, and control the light, and all these other things, and, well, call it ridiculous or what have you, but it was the most incredible thing I’ve ever experienced.”

  “As far as you know,” I smirk.

  Her nose twitches when she laughs and I smile, teenaged again.

  “Actually,” she says, sobering, “I have to go. I’m due at work.”

  I stand and she stands and shells out a few dollars onto the table and the bartender in the empty café looks up briefly from his magazine and then returns us our privacy.

  “So can we meet up again some time?” I ask.

  Holland’s dimples appear and I feel like a jerk for being so smitten, but there she is before me, completely unawares I know how her cunt tastes, even if it wasn’t her in the driver’s seat at the time.

  “Maybe,” she says. “Yeah. You know where I work, now.”

  “You didn’t actually say.”

  “Madame Christ’s,” Holland says and winks. “Cornelius and Fifty-First.”

  “OK. Well I know now.”

  She starts to smile again, a quick retort from her mouth, and then she catches herself, her expression halfway to somber again.

  “I was going to say maybe I’ll see you out there in costume first, but I guess until you work out this whole powers thing. . . ?”

  “Yeah. It’s a . . . turd.”

  She touches my arm, fingers as light as a feather.

  “Good luck with, you know, all of it.”

  “Thanks, Holland.”

  “Seeya, Joe.”

  The curvy blonde tightens the belt on her overcoat and slips through the café doors as a light rain begins to fall and somewhere a siren is ringing and neither of us give it a second thought.

  *

  IT IS FRIDAY. The papers have performed the autopsy and the news for the Sentinels isn’t good, but I’m not thinking about any of that. Mechano’s is pulsing with ambulatory light below, but I am up on a fire escape ladder like a false copy of my former self, neon reflecting off the gold badge of the zed on my chest as I avoid any glimpses from below.

  “Zephyr,” the voice comes from across the rooftop. “Over here.”

  From the outside I know I am the perfect simulacrum, but the truth lies plain as a corpse between us and the Nightwatchman and I know there is no skirting the reality here. I step gingerly over an air-conditioning unit and the black-clad ghost is there with the steam rising elegantly behind him, theatrical like I know he likes it because at the end of the day for all his quirks the crazy bastard is just another one of us.

  “So what the fuck happened to you?” Geoff asks.

  “Shanghaied,” I reply. “Walked into a trap. Bitch killed my powers.”

  “Name?”

  “Spectra.”

  “Never heard of her,” he says.

  “Yoko Ono.”

  “The . . . Japanese chick who broke up the Beatles?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She must be seventy by now,” the Nightwatchman snorts. “Zephyr, you pussy.”

  “I don’t know how she does it, but she’s about as close to seventy as you are,” I tell him. “And she had a legion of super goons there ready to wail on my ass.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you want me for?”

  Although I thought I had prepared for this, my word hoard is empty and I gesture to the benighted scene around us and have to laugh, embarrassed, and shake my head.

  “It’s a hell of a thing,” I say weakly and feel ill and glance away, almost wishing now someone could break this up.

  The Nightwatchman never registered and there’s an open warrant for his arrest even without the various policemen they claim he’s assaulted over the years.

  “Just speak, Joe.”

  Geoffrey never calls me by name, or hardly ever, though I have rarely returned him the favor. I lift my head now and the bondage mask simply stares at me, alien and remote despite my sudden expectation of warmth and understanding from this most law-abiding of potential serial killers.

  “There’s a man called Seagal in California,” I say at last. “I think he killed my mother and I think he’s killed again. If someone doesn’t bring him to justice, Synergy and Vanguard and their gal pals are gonna wade in and there could be bodies from here to Washington.”

  “Sounds dire,” the Nightwatchman replies.

  “Will you look into it?”

  “Me?”

  The cold laughter shocks me as assuredly as a bucket of water over the head.

  “Well, yeah,” I say.

  “I don’t think so, Zephyr.”

  “I’m not . . . you don’t get this, I think. I’m not Zephyr now.”

  “Then why did you dress up like that tonight?”

  For a moment there’s nothing I can tell him. I gesture obliquely again and then look at the gold zed on my chest reflecting the horned moon.

  “I guess I thought I might be able to fool you.”

  “And instead you’re fooling yourself.”

  “I don’t have the powers this requires,” I tell him.

  “The Zephyr I know would never admit that,” Geoffrey replies. “He’s too much of a total ass.”

  We laugh, which is to say I laugh and he snickers softly beneath the mask as much in pity as sympathy and when I lift my hurt, embarrassed gaze again, the fucker stands with an air of imminent departure.

  “You’re better than this,” he says. “Let’s pretend this never happened. I catch you again without your powers and I’m gonna beat you six ways to fucking Sunday, bitch.”

  The Nightwatchman taps the side of his temple meaningfully and steps backwards over the edge of the building and disappears. I barely flinch, accustomed to the carnival trick, and sit simply with my hands clutched together and a weak, embarrassed, pitiful, self-deprecatory smirk softening to a whimper on my face.

  Zephyr 7.7 “Less Than Zero”

  THE APARTMENT OVERLOOKS the water like Loren wants, but the view
is mostly TV aerials and satellite dishes and a few neon bar signs before the masts and chimneys of the tug boats rise up a half-block distant. We have pitifully few possessions to move in and together we lug a broken sofa from the alley outside up three flights of fire escape and sit before the warehouse window of the open loft and watch the silvery reflection of the water on the tin roofs across from us.

  “This is nice,” Loren says and cuddles into my arm and rests her cheek on my shoulder. “Thank you.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re thanking me for,” I say a little sulkily. “You paid the bond.”

  “I know you’ll pay me back.”

  I lean forward and sink my face into my hands.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “What’s the matter?” Loren’s fingers scratch through the hair on the back of my head and I sigh, but the relief is transitory.

  “My life,” I say, words muffled.

  “Is it all that bad?” she says and makes a warm, comforting noise.

  I can’t say anything to her because I know what she’s thinking. All the same, my life is in tatters compared to what I had before. A beautiful and empathic girlfriend sadly does not equal up to everything I’ve left behind. And the marvel of it all is that my life has fallen apart in record time, so quickly that I barely noticed any of it change until now, sitting with the springs pricking into my butt and the smell of rats fucking and effluent and motor oil and dust and old wood and the ghosts of Christmases past and whatever the hell it was they used to do in this converted factory a hundred years ago all cloying in my nose.

  It strikes me with sudden, credible force that I’m in shock.

  While that is some succor – meaning once I have cried and yelled and slept and ate, I will probably be able to put one foot in front of the other again – at the same time the irreversible fact is putting my feet on the ground is the only thing I’m ever likely to be able to do, ever again. I flew – I truly flew – not like anything the Earth had ever seen before, and now all those abilities and my rich, indefatigable senses are stripped back to prosaic reality, trapping me in the prison of urban life with the millions of others who once looked up at me and felt the dream stir and the confronting reality that I am like a fiction compared to them and their dreary ongoing undeniable normalcy. And not just to fly, but to cheat death, smash physics, defend justice and dance before the Devil’s breath and be able to laugh about it over drinks at Halogen or the Flyaway or Silver Tower or even sneaking through the back at Transit or Aubergine, some model on my arm and the Power of Greyskull in my loins.

  Loren gets up to check the hot water and I bow over again and want to vomit.

  It’s now fifty-eight hours since I asked Synergy to give me a day to think on things and the Zephyr phone’s battery has run down in my gym bag.

  Fuck fuck fuck fucketty fuck.

  *

  A WEEK LATER and we have a bed and a refrigerator and a cat named Duffy who lets himself through a loose pane in one of the windows and comes and goes across the waterfront as he pleases, a perfect arrangement really because the first few days in the apartment in Van Buren are a blur of take-out and late nights and deeply carnal sex and me lying on my stomach with the glow of Budweiser red coming through the dirty glass as Loren sits up, hair spilling over her luscious boobs, a finger marking tracery across my back as she discusses space, the universe and everything, and I mark the time in monosyllables, a deep, monolithic, existential woe working its way through my system like the mother of all bowel disorders, and I cling to the promise that there will be a time again when I am no longer feeling less than zero and Loren, patient and penitent as she is, merely purses her lips and says nothing when I threaten to spoil the mood; and after counting to a hundred or doing her rosary or reciting the names of the saints under her breath or whatever it is she does, a contented smile returns to her perfect features and she rolls me over and inflames my inevitable lazy lust and we do it all again.

  “You’re missing the life,” she says nonsensically one morning as we sit on the edge of the futon eating cereal and watching Duffy chase a tumbleweed of cotton fluff and pubic hair across the bare floor boards.

  “What?”

  “I don’t really think you miss your powers. I think you miss being Zephyr.”

  I shake my head at the stupidity of her statement and smack my lips to show my displeasure before returning to my meal more desultory than I was before.

  “You should think about it,” she says.

  “You think about it,” I answer her. “Lioness.”

  “I only did that for you,” Loren says. “But maybe that’s the answer.”

  A match flares somewhere in the back of my thoughts, but as soon as it is born, the hope gutters and dies as I remember all the other realities I’ve been desperately trying not to entertain.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The people are wondering about where Zephyr’s gone,” she says.

  “He’s disappeared before. They can speculate.”

  I wonder how Loren can even say such things, since we have no TV or phone line and I haven’t fired up my computer since we moved. Then again, she actually sometimes leaves this place. Not me.

  “And if he’s not back?” she asks.

  “If this is you trying to make me feel better, stop. You’re doing it wrong.”

  “Think about it,” Loren says and drops her bowl into a pile of discarded clothing and slides behind me, in the grip of genuine enthusiasm now, her hands cupping my shoulders and massaging the tense flesh. “What about all those bad guys getting away with things? All those mad, bad, crazy motherfuckers we’ve taken on over the years.”

  “Motherfuckers?” I laugh at the caustic language about as natural-sounding as Mandarin from her mouth. “Guys like Crescendo and Hubris and Grimoire would eat me for breakfast now.”

  “And this Spectra woman?”

  “Yeah. Her too,” I say. And her brats.

  “What about all the others guys? The Turncoats and the Madrigals and the Fallouts of the world?”

  She punches my shoulder and slides down next to me resplendent in one of my white singlets and a pair of lacy briefs.

  “Hey, what about The Snark and The Fell,” she says, referring to a pair of super-powered serial killers I haven’t thought about in ten years. “Didn’t you lose your powers for a while or something fighting them?”

  “Not the same,” I sigh and then sigh again at the recollection. “I was so much younger then. They paid Zero to lure me in and the fucker cancelled my powers while they attacked. They were killing masks. Had a collection of them.”

  “And you stopped them.”

  “Yeah.”

  I nod, unable to refute it.

  It doesn’t mean it makes any sense. And it doesn’t mean I can stop thinking about it, either.

  I turn to Loren and squeeze her in my big arms and she purrs like a pussycat and I let her drop me on my back on the bed as she straddles me, playful as she snarls, pinning me down, and my strength is at one and the same time a reminder of the power I’ve lost as well as what I still possess.

  Zephyr 7.8 “Eighteen Or Nineteen”

  OKAY, HERE’S A motherfucking flashback for you.

  I’m eighteen or nineteen, I guess a year out of school and my moms still waiting for me to break them the bad news about college while I spend my nights and most my days dressed in a gaudy red-and-white lycra get-up that started as a hand-me-down from Captain All-Star and became my own with a little of Elisabeth’s best needle-work. Cocksure and arrogant, in the summer I defeat the Ill-Centurion for the first time and then take on the Incredible Smoking Man, Tabitha – Queen of Cats, Wendigo, the Tungsten Terror, and even team up for a while with the original Dark Arrow.

  Then I run into Diamond Destiny, a relic from the late 70s who I don’t take seriously enough when I foil her and a band of goons trying to steal a particle laser or some such shit from a Navy base and the old bitch beats me to a pulp
and leaves me for dead on the Jersey train line.

  I am rolling over and groaning softly and making small noises of self-pity when a hard-as-nails voice grunts and I am dragged off the rails.

  “You can’t fight for shit, boy,” the man says. “Got plenty of punch, but fuck. You got no idea what to do with it.”

  I may or may not mutter something about being happy to show him what I can do and the voice suggests I wait till I’ve been released from rehabilitation and its then I realize the rock-hard old slut has broken both my legs and shattered my shoulder-blade. I’m as good as fucked, to coin a phrase, and I look up groggily with a grin on my splintered face and notice the guy doing all the talking is wearing a mask too.

  And I groan.

  “I’m Hawkwind, kid. Look me up when you get out of traction if you want to learn what to do with all that spunk.”

  In and out of consciousness, I listen as he uses a police radio to call on a favor and two paramedics arrive in the middle of the deserted old train yards and I am carted onto a gurney and when I come to next I am in the back room of Mercy Hospital as an unregistered guest, a doctor I will come to know pretty well down the track named Greerson feeling my wrist and asking me about my healing factor.

  Days go by. Well, weeks. The bones knit and do their job straight, thanks to early intervention, showing clearly my powers haven’t deserted me. All the same, as the weeks turn into a month since my pounding, I find it’s not so much the power as the urge to make like a Christmas tree has left, almost completely. Beth’s undertaking her first abortive attempt at college and Max and George are making noises about an inner city apartment as I mooch in the old back room. Clearly they’re never going to sell, but even at nineteen or whatever I am, I can read the adult clues saying they’re not thrilled to be giving board to a teenage layabout. Of course, my story about falling down a disused well while drunk to explain my injuries probably didn’t do me any favors, but I just couldn’t admit to even a watered-down version of the facts where anyone got the jump on me.

  Beth comes on one of her visits down from Ithaca and its then I realize it’s been two months since Zephyr last flew and the week doesn’t go great and she heads back to school not knowing it’s going to be her last semester, her dad’s death and my post-pubescence playing havoc with her studies. George comes in and sits on the end of my bed just moments after I finish beating off to a Pamela Anderson spread in Playboy (hard to believe she was ever hot, or once had normal breasts) and tries to get to the bottom of my business, but of course I brush her off, sitting up in bed with my underpants around my ankles under the covers not being very conducive to anything deep and meaningful.