“Include me out,” I said.
And he wanted to know, “Do you consider that a serious option?”
For a moment we hovered over Gotham City, then that dark city faded to nothingness, and only the shimmering lights of the Aurora surrounded us.
As a boy I’d gone to Minneapolis with my father and seen the flickering curtains of light in the night sky for the first time on a road in the middle of nowhere, with no city lights to obscure our view. We’d stopped and stood out in the cold, shivering, and I would not leave until my father finally had started the engine again and flipped on the headlights to overpower my sight. Even then I’d begged him to drive with the lights off so I could watch out the window until oncoming traffic had begun to build and blot out the sky. The little collection of electrostatic patterns in the night there was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
As a teenager I’d decided with certainty, because of those lights, an age-old issue filled with doubts and questions: whether there was a God. Even then I’d known only a hand like His could so casually have arranged ionic matter and rogue electrons in a pattern that would look to those below like a curtain in the sky.
The big eyes on butterflies’ wings are to ward off predators. The colors and patterns of flowers are to attract bees who could spread their pollen. The mane of the male lion is there to attract the attention of the female lion and perpetuate the mane-bearer’s genetic line. But the Aurora hangs in the sky for no practical survival purpose at all. It’s there only to be beautiful, and can be nothing but the gift of a loving God. I’d come to that conclusion during a callow, self-involved adolescence. I suppose I know it still.
But as surely as He has given us the Aurora and the stars in the sky, He sent this dark-edged angel to impress me into his oh-so-vital service, and I was not sure I wanted any of it.
The Spectre pulled back the comfortable blanket of Aurora that surrounded me when we “traveled,” and below us was the Outerborough Bridge, the old span that linked midtown Metropolis with the two counties east of the river.
How long had it been since he plucked me up from my church after Sunday morning services? Had all our travels and sightings fit into a moment? Or had it been years? I had no sense of time now, the way I had always imagined the sensation of living as a spirit to be. But as we descended gently through the sky to the foot of the bridge, and my apparent size contracted from that of a continent to that of an ordinary, rather diminutive man, I felt the smell of my body coming back to me. I was still a wraith, like the Spectre, but to be surrounded by this familiar place, so few blocks from my home, was to be almost corporeal again.
“That’s all?” I asked. “That’s all you have to show me?”
“That disturbs you?”
“I have a problem with the job description,” I told him. “I did not understand my duties to include standing idly by while the world went down the nearest drain.”
I think this perplexed him. He did not respond. As for me, it was the opportunity of my dreams. I was negotiating ethical policy with a duly constituted representative of the Creator of the Universe. Like Abraham arguing over the disposition of Sodom. Like Jonah begging off the warning to Nineveh. Like Jeremiah pleading ineptitude at his call to prophesy.
I would have done better if I had gone to law school.
“What were your words, can we recall?” I nudged this grim spirit. “You want me to help you to ‘seek justice’? To ‘guide’ you in determining who is responsible for the destruction of … of … whatever is about to be destroyed?”
“That would be the world as you know it,” the Spectre said as we touched down on the sidewalk below the tramway that traced the course of the Outerborough Bridge.
“Define your terms,” I persisted. “What world? Worlds die all the time. Lives end. Hopes perish. Dreams crash and burn. Yet your very existence is a testament of hope. A declaration that God hears prayer, that the spirit is eternal. You’re an angel. That makes you a messenger of hope. Where’s my hope, Spectre?”
“At no time did I promise you hope.”
Around us the city milled. Pedestrians passed through our incorporeal forms. Above us the tram emptied of commuters from the Governor’s Island housing development and filled with shoppers on their way to the big mall on that little island in the river. The occasional flying person ambled through the edges of the sky. Buildings loomed. Traffic snarled. It seemed a usual day, unsullied by the insult to the biosphere or by what the Spectre so quaintly referred to as the impending “end of the world.”
“A greater power sent you,” I said. “Your very existence is testimony to the viability of faith. Yet all you have to tell me is that those who could save us, won’t?”
I paused, but not for effect. Were I corporeal, I certainly would have needed to catch a breath, and I paused because habit told me I needed to do so.
“Then it is my judgment,” I said, “that the guilty is he who denies hope. Punish yourself and the horse you came in on.”
“Horse?”
“But first be so kind as to return me to my life, please.”
The angel drew himself up to an imposing height and stood over me and said, “That is not an answer.”
“That is rather not the answer you solicit,” I said. “If your preconceptions rule you, then you have no need for me. My life, please. I understand that I have affairs to get in order.”
“What are you, man?”
“I have no idea,” I snapped. I was on a roll now. “You’re the one with the eternal truths, aren’t you? But I do know a few things that I’m not. I’m not a pushover. I’m not a slave. I’m not an angel encumbered with divine imperatives. I’m not some Dickensian clown you can intimidate with Victorian guilt. And I’m not biting. Home, please. I quit.”
“You cannot quit,” he whispered. “Do you have a mission assigned you by the Author of Creation? Have you stood face to face with God in the inmost chamber of the continuum? Have you been told by the Lord of the Universe what is expected of you?”
And I remembered the seeking of my youth. And I remembered the exultation and then the wave of sudden peace enveloping me when I chose my vocation. And I remembered to whom I answered when I sat in my house and when I walked and when I lay down and when I rose. And I thought of the still, small voice I heard from before I myself could talk and continued to hear; the voice that came from my head or my heart or from somewhere untouchable in my being. And I answered:
“Yes…
“… I…
“… have.”
I had not felt so alive since my Ellen had stood at my side to remind me.
CHAPTER 8
Portents and Imperatives
The Spectre, enormous and imposing, slowly faded from my line of sight even as I regained my own physical form right there on the sidewalk in front of a hundred drivers and passengers and passersby. If anyone noticed my rematerialization, the only indication was that they might have jagged in their path to go around rather than through me. No one registered alarm or even surprise at seeing a little man in a white beard and a navy blue cardigan appear out of thin air. Not much could rattle a Metropolitan.
Here was something that did:
A florid woman in whiteface and the checkered costume of a clown dropped from the superstructure of the streetside tramway station onto the roof of the tram as it pulled out toward the bridge. Throwing her head up at the sky, she called out, in as shrill and loud a voice as I had ever heard, apparently at a monstrous many-jointed robot that descended toward her from somewhere above a cloud.
Before the robot could fall to light on the roof of the tram by her side, all hell broke through the nervous calm of the city afternoon.
I learned later that the woman called herself “the Joker’s Daughter,” though she was no relation to that deluded clown who’d died on a Metropolis street almost ten years before. The robot was named N-I-L-8—a play on words when you say it out loud—and responded to the voice comma
nds of those who knew the code. And out from below and behind them—from inside the cable car itself, I supposed—climbed a third figure: a man in heavy boots and a cowl and an armored gray chest-plate with a kind of shield over it that said, in red block letters on a field of yellow, FAIR PLAY. I learned his name later on, too. He called himself “Mr. Terrific.”
The three of them, woman, man, and robot, faced down four opponents—Thunder, Swastika, Trix, and Manotaur—who seemed to materialize out of nowhere and then crouched on the bridge plying their powers. I was as acutely aware of the play-by-play of this rumble as I had been of the one in the street days earlier, the one that had begun with the tumbling of the metro bus, and for the same reason. I was in imminent danger here. No sooner had I dismissed the Spectre and his proposal out of hand than I found myself in this life-threatening situation. So I studied these terribly powerful children, studied their every move. It seemed to me, for example, that I’d seen the man-bull—Manotaur—and the biomechanical morphing person—Trix—in that very same rumble in the street, but whereas they’d fought against one another previously, they contended on the same side this time. I should not even have noted it as something odd; it was not. This was a game to them, these children who played fast-and-loose with our lives.
Trix, Swastika, and Manotaur’s “powers,” at that moment, appeared to consist of being able to hold and fire large automatic weapons. That seemed to be precisely what the Joker’s Daughter, Mr. Terrific, and even the robot N-I-L-8 were doing, just shooting. To be fair, the ordnance N-I-L-8 possessed was actually built into the machine, and was thus quite a bit bigger and heavier than that of any of the others. No one but those of us on the ground and the footpath of the Outerborough Bridge seemed to mind, and certainly we did not count. Only Thunder, the young African-American child—he could not have been older than twelve, I judged—was using anything resembling a “superpower.” He shot tendrils of static electricity, stylized lightning bolts, from his hands.
I wondered what actually constituted a “superpower” these days. Was it merely, as this sociopath Swastika illustrated, the ability to deform your body and engage in spontaneous public warfare? Swastika’s “superpower” appeared to consist of the willingness to undergo a full-body tattoo. That is, his entire body was tattooed that dull blue graphite color, except for the bare flesh that formed the shape of a swastika in its negative space. Was his superpower his ability to withstand the pain that this process involved? Or was it his ignorance of history? Surely, somewhere along the line of his short life, this young man had taken a genetic test—you could buy them in drugstores—and upon seeing the blue color generated by the little yellow stick, he’d determined that he was one of the one-in-seven who had the metagene. So he had manufactured an identity for himself and dubbed himself superpowered. Still, these “heroes” never seemed to get hurt, even in this deadly game, even when it appeared they meant to hurt each other.
Surely the metagene imparts to its possessor a measure of initiative and ability, even when it does not manifest any “powers” per se. Would that it imparted sensibility as often.
I was in the line of fire between Joker’s Daughter on the roof of the tram and Trix hanging from a cable of the bridge. I dropped flat on the surface of the bridge, quivering with the knowledge that suddenly I was again sufficiently corporeal to die. I rolled where I could and crept like an inchworm where I had to, to get as far from the danger as possible. That was not very far. The weapons fire went on for what seemed days. Playing it back in my mind, I realized it could not have lasted longer than thirty seconds. The tram cable kept moving, and through the rumble it traveled only from several yards outside its station to the edge of the bridge itself: a distance equivalent to crossing a wide street. It was time enough for mothers to yank their children to what appeared to be safety behind stopped cars or under cover of bridge pillars. It was time enough for the gunfire itself to be drowned in the screaming of terrified motorists and pedestrians. It was time enough for a disaster to strike out at the dozens of folks innocently riding home, encased in the see-through peapod of the cable car.
Either through the contrivance of those firing at the woman and the man riding the roof of the tram, or just from the weight of the robot N-I-L-8, who covered their passage with weapons fire, the cable guiding the tram frayed and unwove. Its track snapped. The car full of people slid off its groove, and the dozens of helpless souls within were caught like a panicky herd of cattle trapped in a sudden roll of lava. There was a bullet hole in the window of the tram, and I could see that at least one person inside, a young bearded man in his thirties, was injured and bloody. As one, the passengers creased back their lips to object with their howls of despair.
I was on the walking path leading to the bridge. There were others around me, along with a railing on either side. There was no getting away from this spot as broken cable snaked by my face on its way to the river below. The listing tram pointed in my direction to begin its fall.
“We don’t need judgment,” I hollered at no one in particular as disaster reared up from the lapping river below. “We need hope!” I screamed at whoever, unseen, could have been listening. If the Spectre, invisible to me now, was truly gone, and my weak voice was lost among the rumble of this scene, then surely God heard. But did He care?
For a moment my head reeled. I saw the vision again, the smoky angel plunging through red licks of flame. That was what Wesley had seen and what I was seeing. The destruction of Kansas was just the beginning of the end. Those who called themselves heroes shared a silent guilt. I looked and saw how they dealt with it: worse than before. Not out of boredom did they act; rather, they acted with abandon. “And the third part of the trees was burnt up and all green grass was burnt up and the sun and the air were darkened.”
I realized I was speaking aloud. Then I shook it off, and it was gone.
Without warning, a streak of primary-colored light whispered along the edges of our sight. This was no illusion. This was real.
There was a wind. But it was not a wind. It was a blur of motion that creased the air. And when the blur passed, it left behind twisted and broken weapons and startled combatants. Now the tram full of people tumbled end over end toward me still.
And a whirlpool rose from the river below, chasing the disaster that had preceded it. It was a twister of water that bent sideways from below our feet to angle around the bridge, then upward toward the sky. It caught the falling tram on a pillow of roiling liquid and deposited it—not softly, but no more roughly than the good landing of a plane—on a suddenly cleared portion of the bridge only yards from where I stood.
The folks in the tram settled in their places and the whirlpool receded back onto the river, and the doors of the vehicle slid open to let the riders, rattled but intact, step out to safety. Those who’d brought about this furor, whose abandon would casually snuff who knows how many lives, gathered their wits and the remaining pieces of their ordnance and looked around with caution bordering on terror. Where would it materialize? Would they ever see its face before it brushed by them again?
We all knew. Those who’d grown up here, and those who’d adopted this city, did so knowing that such things once happened here with regularity and might happen again one day.
He changed the course of a mighty river. He bent steel in his bare hands.
Many of us, empowered by the vacuum that despair suddenly left behind, rushed to help the tram riders, some of them grinning widely and bleeding here and there at the same time. Even before the bystanders freed themselves of the cable car, they knew. We all knew, and we remembered.
“Look!” someone said.
“Up in the sky!” someone else said, louder this time.
“It’s a bird!” It was not a bird.
“It’s a plane!” It was a song, a chorus, a refrain grown more beloved for its absence during these years.
Floating stately from above came the Man of Steel. The Last Son of Krypton. The Eternal H
ero. The Man of Tomorrow. The hope, at last. The never-ending battle had a champion again.
“It’s Superman!”
He held the dismembered slag of N-I-L-8, the combat robot, in one hand, and dangling from the other by their respective trousers were the clown woman and the FAIR PLAY man whose artifice had invited the chaos of this day. Superman opened both hands, and his burdens fell ungracefully to the surface of the bridge as he hovered there still.
He looked great. No more white beard, and his hair was short and gray against the nape of his neck. The uniform was as of old, but the emblem was a little simpler, the red now a slash of an S against a pentagonal field of black rather than gold. Gold was the color of the rival whose intrigues and disasters had soured him on this city once upon a time. Was it the darkness of his visage that had moved him to alter the emblem, or was it simply a desire to repudiate his presumed successor? Magog, the golden prince, was the one who’d brought the disaster that brought Superman back to us.
… brought Superman back to us.
He had not turned his back on us forever, after all. He’d reversed himself, and so could I. There he stood in the sky, faith rewarded.
But the imperatives of my unconscious mind gripped my voice and sight again.
I looked up at him and, in a vision the likes of which I had not suffered since the Spectre pulled me out of church to press our doleful journey, I saw him screaming through the red licks of flame. I saw Superman, in the sky and in the future at the same time. Here, above the heads of those he’d saved, he was grim and potent. There, in my vision, in the same place, he mourned all he ever held close. He mourned at the top of his lungs and the limits of his moral strength. The smoky figure of my crimson vision suffered in fire, in physical pain, in blinding heat and of woeful countenance. The threat of Armageddon was alive. It had just begun.
Dear God, I thought, you have sent your true angel back to us to bring us peace, but you decree that this is destined to bring only loss.
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