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Jalaeka: Metropolis

There’s a kind of hush all over the world tonight: the sound of lovers in love. The rosy fug of it is so overpowering that I can’t hear the special kind of silence I’m listening for; the one that will tell me I’m about to die.

It’s long past midnight. From my premium vantage point on the top of the Syndicated DC Building I can see the whole of Manhattan before me, stretching north towards Central Park. Hoboken’s bricktown lies over the water to my left, the brownstone weight of Brooklyn to my right, a rain-washed splendour of light and concrete. Its electrified pizzazz fades very suddenly into the murky gaslights and pillared mansions of Gotham. Gotham, seeded by trees in permanent winter coats of ice, shrouded eternally in mist seeping from the ground, ruled by wolves.

Staten Island simply does not exist. The rotting piles of an enormous, abandoned shipyard stand in its place, every stanchion and plank half as big again, in its way, as any human structure. I can smell the pitch on their vast timbers. The copper has long since oxidized to green on the signs that tell of ferry journeys to the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Congo, the Styx. No ship has ever moored there. They say that ghosts come and go over the water from its silent terminals, so in this world at least one charm is missing.

If charms ever had such power I’d be chanting charms like a machine gun spits bullets.

Behind me the wind blows fitfully from Gotham’s worm-riddled Germanic spires. It smells of incense and twisted passions. I like to visit but I couldn’t live there, although some of my best friends do. It’s popular with everyone young enough to play with death.

Two witches pass high over me on the way to Fifth Avenue. I can hear them chattering excitedly about some new restaurant down there. The wind abates after they’ve gone, as if someone flicked the switch on a fan. I’m glad it’s stopped, it was making my flesh crawl.

I can’t see anybody I’m looking for but I can feel them moving through the hidden walls of this world, searching for me. They’re very close: one breath out of place and they’ll taste my shadow, come swirling around the edge of the hydrogen atoms and sink their neutrino teeth right into me. My flesh is still crawling. So, not the wind—maybe they’re actually under my skin.

I wish someone would hurry up and commit some felonies out here. Breaking and entry, robbery with violence, gang fights, pimps beating on their girls or boys—I’m not fussy, any of the standard moves would do. Anything to create a diversion.

A Batmobile cruises along Avenue of the Kryptonites. It’s one of the early models, all white-wall tyres and fins. There’s no rush for him: he’s obeying the traffic signals and his jets aren’t lit. I wonder where he’s going to that he couldn’t go as a Bruce Wayne. Maybe he’s off to that bar the witches wanted to get into, where the good guys and the bad guys drink together, roll their sleeves and complain about the price of Active Spandex.

I’ve drunk with them plenty of times. We all get pleasant jaw ache recounting how many years you can go on getting beat up day after day before you have to retire and go home to Earth to watch your rocket boots gather dust. Of course I was lying to fit in, but that’s not the point. Ennui is the fashion for heroes. Every fantasy loses its lustre in the end and nodding sagely about it is the consolation prize. Glory and approval are for neophytes, for whom every bar goes quiet and faces turn away. Old boys and girls are beyond that. They want something bigger, deeper without knowing what it is. They want to taste immortality and feel its cold fingers c