“Seeker.”
“She’s not Seeker any more,” I say. “But yeah. Pack your things. You’re staying with your deadbeat dad tonight.”
“Finally,” Tessa says and moves off, feigning bored excitement. “I get to be like every other teenager.”
Zephyr 7.10 “Still Dreaming”
IT IS AFTER dark and we wait for Loren at a table at the Vietnamese place and we order duck and curry chai and honey pork and Loren is late, coming in out of the golden rain beneath the lamp post and into the bustling plastic-chaired restaurant where the waiters wear white industrial gum boots to their knees and everything has been hosed down. She is wearing silver eye shadow and more make-up than I’m accustomed to, but she looks bright and beautiful and possibly too young for me as I introduce the two women in my life and Loren winces at Tessa’s handshake and then they sit, one either side across from me.
“I’m sorry about our misunderstanding,” Loren says at the outset.
“Hey, don’t mention it,” Tessa says. “I always wanted to see Rome.”
“I know this is sudden, meeting me like this,” Loren answers. “Things have been changing awfully fast for a lot of us.”
“Don’t worry. I’m used to dad screwing anything in lycra with boobs.”
“Honey –”
“I’m just shitting you, dad. Sorry, Loren,” Tessa says, not really entirely contrite and mischievous, suddenly a shorter, curvier reminder of the girl her mother once was.
Tessa tugs down her own wool cap and slurps the achingly hot chili soup from her meal and dabs at the bowl with VN bread and I order a Coke and Loren tries to catch my eye and smiles when she does.
“I got your dad a surprise,” she says to Tessa when we’re done.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Are you coming back?”
“He’s making me,” Tessa replies.
“I’m actually just obeying the law,” I say and make to cuff her over the back of the head and she doesn’t exactly laugh, but we get along on the short walk around the block and up the outside stairs.
I have hardly noticed the big brown paper bag Loren has been lugging and by the glow of the Budweiser sign and our dingy bed lamp she empties the sack onto the end of the futon and at first I think she’s just purloined an early version of my Zephyr costume, only the leather coat is an open number and there is a Kevlar vest and what are indeed a pair of my leather pants and some other items and I pick up a long black bandanna and eye Loren suspiciously.
“I thought you could tie it like this,” she says and moves behind me and I only consent because I am astonished to see Tessa giggling as the traditional Zorro mask is bound around my face, leaving my eyes free.
“Aw, dad. . . .”
“What’s this?”
“Haven’t you been thinking about it?” she asks.
“Um, well. . . .”
“You’ll have to think of a new name,” Loren whispers into my ear and then kisses my cheek and steps back and I look suitably badass if not a little homosexual in the bar mirror that was bolted to the wall before we even moved in here.
“Wow, the gay avenger,” Tessa says from the side.
“Thanks honey. Very supportive.”
“Well, sorry Tessa, you might want to cover your ears or something,” Loren says with another wink, “but I think he looks hot.”
“You’ve already shown you’ve got a weak spot for dudes in leather,” Tessa replies.
“Guilty as charged,” Loren laughs.
“What’s the rest of this stuff?” I ask and start turning over the various items.
“Ballistic vest with Gore-tech stab-proof lining, Kevlar thigh guards, and um, cup. Leather pants. The trench coat is kind of Matrix, I thought.”
“I hated Tom Cruise in that,” Tessa says from the side.
“Boots?”
“Well, your own,” Loren says. “I was careful, buying all these. No one can trace these items back to you or me.”
I nod and lean over and peer at a business card amid the clothing I pick up and read, the image of a woman naked from the back always going to pique my interest. The card is for a local strip club and the reverse is bare except for a cell number written in pen.
“What’s this?” I ask.
Loren sets her chin and I can feel Tessa tense and retreat.
“That’s the other thing I was going to tell you about,” she says.
“I got a job.”
*
AN HOUR OR two into my sleep I sit up aware I am still dreaming because John Lennon is at the foot of my bed.
“How did you get here?” seems like a sensible thing to ask until it is out of my mouth, or at least that’s how the dream goes.
“I’ve been with you a long time, Joe,” Lennon says and turns so he’s looking more at me and he smiles, just softly, nothing but benevolence in his eyes shielded behind small round sunglasses.
“Are you really John Lennon?”
“One and the same. Are you really Zephyr?”
“I’m not sure of that any more.”
“And are you really my son?” he asks in that stark, almost countrified accent of his, famous from old footage.
There’s a beat.
“That’s what they tell me,” I say.
“You need to stay strong, Joseph.”
“What does that mean, in this, um, context?”
“You mean because you’re dreaming?”
“Well, yeah.”
“It means you’re my little secret weapon, Joey-boy.”
“That’s what the Demoness said. Spectra. Yoko Ono.”
“Ah, you can’t believe that lying tart.”
“But she’s your woman,” I say.
“Only in this world,” Lennon answers.
“Can you . . . tell me what’s going on?”
“There’s a key to understanding all of this,” Lennon says. “Sorry, pal, that I can’t tell you more now. I see everything you do and everything you think. But the walls are too strong for me to help you. I’m sorry.”
“Where . . . are you?”
“Elvis is the key,” Lennon says and stares down the bed at me quite seriously. “Find Elvis, son. Then everything else will fall into place. The world’s not the place it’s meant to be. Find the King.”
I am still frowning at this last bit of eloquence when I wake up with a start, perhaps because Loren’s arm is across my face or perhaps because Tessa is gently snoring on the couch we fixed up with about a dozen blankets. The night is still and calm and a fog is easing up from the river and somewhere a ship or perhaps a dirigible is sounding its horn, but I don’t notice any of that. My mind is turning over the one question again and again, not quite believing I am asking it, let alone having a hard time wondering about the answer.
Who the hell is Elvis?
Zephyr 7.11 “Psychic Stain”
IT IS COLD among the little people as I stagger from one shop doorway to another with the breath escaping my lungs as gasps of smoke like I’ve imbibed some dragon and not a half-bottle of Jacks and whatever the pills from the guy outside the discount liquor barn was trading. The bottle is jammed into the pocket of my anorak, but the drugs have dissolved into nothingness, spores invading my brain and entrancing neural pathways gelatinous with a temporary disease, an artful malfunction, a deliberate, self-imposed disability that brings pleasure and release and respite and sees me staring hollow-eyed into the reflective glass windows of the pawnbrokers on Rye, the people spilling from the adult megaplex, the teenage girls smoking, cold-eyed, cum in their stomachs and their purses full of twenties as they shop disconsolately along the Bohemian avenue that is Tingle and Lomax, downtown Van Buren a broken palace, the regurgitation of a mall’s contents onto the street, the architecture now topsy-turvy, inside-out without any artistic design, an urban topography like Escher though with none of the clever illusions except the where kids seem to be always shopping and getting high.
The store alarm bell has been ring
ing since before the world was born, but it only comes into my consciousness as the people around me jostle and flee the footpath as the young black male offender makes like a streak towards me. Frankly, my mind is a blur already, but so too is the scene, a vague awareness a woman in bondage attire is shaking an umbrella from the neon-lit entrance to some peccadillo parlor, her make-up thick as a clown might wear it, nose wet from where the drugs have caused a black and nightmarish cavity.
“Stop! Thief!”
I don’t think. Were I to stop and think, you’d be reading someone else’s confessional. The words, fresh from the shopkeep junkie’s mouth, resound within the racial memory of my superhero forebears and I step, pushing off from the cold bricks, and swing my left arm around as the boy passes, his eyes more behind him than upon me, and even without my blessed powers the arm is like a gorilla’s in his path and it takes him just under the throat and he flips, landing back hard on the concrete and I push the lip of the bottle back deep into my pocket and clench my fist and prepare to bust some poor ignorant opportune ass, except the kid doesn’t get up and instead lies there twitching with his eyes flickering like he’s in the electric chair.
A fat man with kind eyes and a t-shirt that reads WHAT NEXT MOTHERFUCKER? pushes me back with concern and a space clears around the boy, stick-thin shoplifted European girls spilling from the pages beneath his Quiksilver hoodie. I am an island of ill intent among the sudden moshpit of Samaritans and I let myself be buffeted by their anxious gestures until I find I am halfway down the block, the X-rated cinema and porno shop forgotten, my vision blurred as I tug the booze from my coat and stare back at the small crowd as phone calls are made and Facebook is updated and insightful tweets are spawned in the ether around us and no wonder genetic freaks are hiding out in the ruins of Manhattan like fairytale trolls, the unseen true wonders of the postmodern, all that shit in the air messing with our chromosomes.
The bottle slips from my fingers and explodes like a grenade on the footpath and nobody looks, the sound just a crescendo in the obscure Philip Glass score of the scene that now awaits my exit.
I am ill enough to vomit and perversely thrilled at the prospect until it happens and then I slide down the shuddering security grille of the discount jewelers and hug myself through the cold arms of my overcoat and think about the double-edged sword of my apparent misfortune.
*
THERE IS AN angel saying something I can’t quite fathom, just to the edge of my dreams of burning cities filled with children and sinewy black monsters pushing me from those burning heights to a nightmare of perpetual descent.
It takes Loren’s rough shaking to turn me over on the sofa, a crust of what I assume to be drool leaking from my mouth like from a wound. I am fresh from the trenches and Loren is my nurse Nightingale, though her delightfully knitted brow radiates more frustration than tender sympathy for my plight.
“Joe, it’s two in the afternoon,” she says when I fail to say anything after several minutes, eyes open and tracking the lazy progress of a butterfly that has somehow entered the apartment through the gap in the windows.
In my mind, my reply is gallant, playful. It emerges as a traffic jam of malformed vowels, the linguistic equivalent of a mini-bus accident full of children from the special school. In my limited experiences, the retarded kid is the happiest one on the bus, but now I find myself resembling one I am too concerned with the diabolical state of my stomach to appreciate the irony.
I manage to get to the loft apartment’s tastefully open plan, open plumbing bathroom before the heave brings forth the fossil record of my last twenty-four hours rendered in protoplasm and colonic bile in orgiastic proportions. Loren winces from the bed and delicately turns away, a lady returning to her needle-work, perhaps, though more likely she is using her embroidered kerchief to wash her hands of me. I kneel gasping with my temple against the cold bowl and after a while my angel returns with a lukewarm coffee she offers in the spirit of Thanksgiving, her pilgrim, me dumb native.
“Drinking again?”
“Not much to do when you’re not around,” I sluggishly reply.
“If we both worked nights, we’d have the days to ourselves.”
“I’m not a morning person,” I say.
“Joe, you’re barely an afternoon person.”
“Sorry. I haven’t established a routine yet. The move and everything.”
She tuts thoughtfully.
“I’m beginning to think you’re making up for lost years. Your poor liver.”
“I want to be drunk,” I reply without meaning to. “When I sleep, then sometimes I see him again.”
“Your father?”
We’ve discussed this.
“Yeah,” I say.
There follows an unhealthy silence encouraging me to sit up, sip the coffee and then slouch towards Bethlehem by way of the mismatched kitchen table set across from the loo. Not having had any visitors yet apart from Tessa, the conflicting smells and lack of privacy haven’t been an issue. It’s all new, Loren tells me, because we’re in love. I say nothing and now it feels like she’s playing me at my own game.
“I guess I should be looking for work,” I say, not because I mean it, but because I figure it’s expected.
Loren makes the sort of noise only she reserves for when I’ve made precisely the wrong call and instantly and comprehensively sees through my words and actions to a detailed chromatographic account of the inspiration behind it, laying my base motives bare. It only makes me hang my head further, closing my eyes to stop the wood grain of the compressed pine tabletop swimming before me.
When I open my eyes, she’s gone.
Eventually, my headache recedes a notch.
*
IT TAKES A while for the mind trick to work, but Sting materializes over my sofa with a put-upon expression that doesn’t completely work on his determinedly handsome features. He steps down from the nimbus of white light to remind me he’s just an astral projection stepped straight from a Benetton catalogue.
“Hey, Zephyr. I thought I said that signal was for emergencies?”
“It is an emergency,” I tell him. “Who’s Roxanne, anyway?”
“Never mind. What is it? I scanned the area from London and I can’t discern any threats except perhaps the bacteria in your bathroom.”
“I need your help,” I say.
“I’m happy to help. Can we skip the exposition though, please? I’m actually having tantric sex with Princess Eugenie at the moment and I need to pop back in before she breaches her fourth chakra.”
He says this, matter-of-fact as you or I would describe the contents of a toaster. I’m not sure whether this disposes me better or worse to the flagrant Englishman, but he winks like I’m in on a joke, so I forge madly ahead.
“I’ve lost my powers. Had them drained. Or something,” I say. “I thought you could help.”
“Me?”
“Well, you’ve been in my brain before. You know the layout.”
The psychic hologram puts his finger to his chin and walks slowly around the open plan of the Van Buren apartment. I’m glad Loren isn’t here to see it, which is of course how I planned it.
“From what I can sense, you’re mentally intact. Possibly more together, in fact.” Sting shrugs eloquently. “I’m not sure I can help you, mate. Sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“Relax. I’m a big believer in synchronicity, Zeph. Just relax. The universe is a beautiful thing and she moves in mysterious ways.”
“Synchronicity.”
“Yeah. Things, sometimes, they’re just meant to be.”
“You know, the smug and unaffected way you say that makes me want to smash your face in,” I mutter.
“Yeah. But you can’t, can you?”
He tilts his head on an angle and smirks.
“Sorry mate. I’d love to help, but I don’t know what I’m meant to do. I could ream your brain, dissect your psyche over the next month and put you back together agai
n. Who knows what we might find? But from what I am seeing now, there’s nothing I can do to free any trapped brain functions restricting your powers.
“How’d it happen?”
I mutter something along the lines of “my mother’s killer’s kids ambushed me” and Sting only raises his eyebrows and nods.
“Well, hope you’re back on deck soon, old man. We’re still waiting to hear what you’re going to do next.”
I don’t watch to see him go. The light bulb glow withdraws from the room behind me and I know he has gone. Only the smugness seems to linger like a psychic stain.
“I didn’t ask you,” I say aloud, knowing full well there is no point.
The same logic hasn’t stopped me breathing yet.
“Who’s Elvis?”
Zephyr 7.12 “Devil’s Advocate”
I TUCK THE letter from the magazine editor into the couch as Loren comes up the fire escape looking tired and lovely, the silver eye-liner a glimmer in the half-moonlight. She pauses in the doorway, one hand above her head to rest her weight against the frame and she smiles and the nights must be getting warmer because her arms are bare and I think it’s almost two weeks now we’ve been in the warehouse. It is 2am and the broken radio is playing jazz and it is Saturday night, the sound of bottles breaking in time to the percussion leaking from the transistor’s tinny speakers.
“Hey,” Loren says and smiles and rests her head against her raised arm, hair like gossamer the color of a moth’s wing with the streetlight somewhere behind it.
“Hey babe,” I say and smile and stand from the couch wearing only jeans and an open cowboy shirt we bought at a recycling boutique on Rye Street the day before.
It is cold in the loft without any heating, though Loren’s also wearing only a singlet and Estefan jeans and knee-high Eskimo boots by Larry Paul.
“Ready for our date?”
I smile, strangely warm, almost sentimental to this tall, curvaceous and misguided woman who has taken me as her own. I’m as intrigued as when she made the mysterious comment before heading off to her shift at the Wild Horses. Now I watch as she makes the visible effort to throw off her tiredness, stepping into the apartment with renewed vigor.
Zephyr II Page 37