The Only Power

They call me a hero. Do they really know what a hero is? Not conspicuous brave deeds, but what it takes. It takes a lot to be a hero. It consumes you. This is a young man’s game. A place of dreams. Better if you don’t have a clue. Stick your ideals on the situation and make it stick. There is something beyond hope in the young. There’s an unwarranted certainty. They know.

Well, I now know and the dream that I was is a hollowed-out husk. They still believe. Of course they do. I’m a part of the fabric of their concocted reality and I keep on playing the part. Luckily for them, I don’t know how to stop. It’s not like I’ve got anything else I’d be doing. Not now. Maybe not ever.

I am a dream made flesh, and in being made flesh I was trapped. This was a trap of my own making. Once here, there was no way back. No way anywhere other than where I am right now. I stand upon a brittle and blackened bone of The City and look down upon a mistake. This was never mine to own, but I took it upon myself anyway. I thought I knew better when I never even tried to think it through. I was playing. Taking on the mantle of the good guy and instantly hating myself for what was necessary in order for good to prevail.

I was justice. A quality that even the gods are wary of. For justice to be applied, there must be knowledge of all things and in that knowledge a full awareness of the consequences lurking in various shadows on the path of multifarious, uncertain futures. Justice is a moving feast, leaving everyone hungry. Some will starve. There is never satisfaction to be had in the pursuit of a concept that cannot live in a living world. Justice itself is a dream that swiftly becomes a nightmare.

I was wrong. I am wrong. I tried to be good when I had no idea what good looked like. I changed myself into something other and in my transformation I stepped as far away from the world of men as was possible. I set myself apart and from that splendid isolation, I selectively judged those beneath me. I was lauded for this random application of myself. They looked up to me and worshipped me for my deeds. I provided them with an illusion. They thought they were safe.

Were they ever safe from me?

With this life I chose, the destiny I forged, it was not for me, hearth and home, and yet I dared to be that man. Only a man. Something real in the midst of the fantasy I had become. I found peace in the mayhem of my existence and only now do I know it for what it was. That was my destiny. She was my destiny. She showed me who I was. The man I was meant to be. The father I had craved all my life. The mother constantly by my side. The lover curled up beside me, safe in my loving embrace.

That was where I made sense. That was real. That was where I was real.

Never mind the madness of the transformation I inflicted upon myself in a failed attempt to escape what I thought I was. She changed me. She brought a calm to my world that I never knew existed. She found me and I found my true place in the world.

She was an impossible dream.

I’ll never know how she came to be. She never belonged in this place. Not in this city. Never with me. And yet we were drawn together, and in our meeting, there was nothing else. My other. The supposed hero. He was as far away from our time together as it was possible to be.

My dirty secret.

A secret that made all the more sense once she was in my life.

I was all too aware of the division within me. I fought to stave off the conflict. I was ashamed of the lie that I was. But I was better. A better man and so a better hero. I began to understand The City in a way I never had. I saw things that had previously escaped me. I ceased to be a reactive, violent act of retribution. I paused, and I thought, and I responded. I found a current that I never knew existed and I went with its flow. I ceased to arrogantly think of myself as The City and instead became a part of it. The City was me and I was The City. We were all of us a part of it and I had to respect that.

I grew, but that was not to say that I receded from the obligation I had created of myself. Now I fought with a renewed strength. I was possessed of an energy that came from all around me. I was more fearsome in the balance I attained. The City wielded to my will and promised to become something more like it was always meant to be. The dream of our forefathers was being fulfilled as last.

I found a way to be, and it hurt far less. Not the physical cuts, scrapes and bruises. The come down. The aftermath. The opening of wounds I carried with me well before I ever slipped on the mask in an attempt to deny their existence.

There was a time when perhaps those wounds began healing. I felt more whole. Knitting together under the warmth of her caress. I saw reflected in her eyes the man I was always meant to be, and I dared to hope that the life we had would stretch far out ahead of us. I never once stopped to think about my other life and where that was headed.

Then Jimmy was born and in the instant that I held him, cradled in my palm. Impossibly small and fragile. My heart reminded me of its presence in my chest and for an insane moment, I thought I was dying as it broke into a thousand pieces, and I experienced an inexplicable pain of loss. Then there was a joy that overwhelmed me and for the first time in my adult life I cried. In my hand, I held everything. The world and more. The weight of it was incredible. My responsibility came crashing down upon me. I was to protect, nurture and care for this tiny being. I was to be his way. The example he would follow. Now I really was a god, and I felt just as small as Jimmy in the shadow of that eternal obligation. An obligation made all the more daunting as it was handed down from each and every one of my ancestors. I was now their representative in this world. Everything they were. Everything they’d done. Their values. Their investment in the world. I was to carry with honour and respect and imbue this tiny man with. This was what it was to be a hero. I was to be Jimmy’s hero, come what may.

That was then.

I have come a long way since that time.

There is a darkness in this city. It wears it well. There is an honesty in this that you don’t get anywhere else. I wish that that honesty resided within me. The darkness is everywhere. I denied my own and in my denial it grew. I foolishly believed that I could separate my two halves and live a life of binary contrast. That was madness. We reside on the border of those two halves. Anything else is a lie.

A man believes that he is defined by what he does, and there is truth in this. We are certainly what we do. All too often, we cheat. We find shortcuts and tell ourselves that we are doing enough. We throw ourselves into work because we can easily see the utility in that work. We are useful and in being useful, we are validated. Self-validation is an inadequacy. We can tell ourselves anything and find a gullible fool to lap it up.

Throwing ourselves into work is an escape. An escape from meaning and the hard yards required to create that meaning. I became more and more busy and instead of creating meaning, I created a gap between myself and everything that meant something to me. I failed in my duty to my family as I fulfilled my obligations to The City with an iron will.

This was the habitual existence I lapsed into. This was my addiction. This was the object of my desire. I looked away from where I was destined to be, and I chose this darkness instead. A hero too cowardly to live as a man.

Then he came along, and everything changed.

Busy didn’t come into it. The whole landscape of The City rippled with his arrival, and he never stopped disrupting the calm that I had managed to achieve with many years of blood, sweat and tears. Yes, I cried behind the mask. No one sees a hero’s tears. That’s why we wear the mask.

You all want to see us fail. You wait with baited-breath for our fall. The allure of death is seductive. All gods must die in order for mortal men to feel at ease with their sinning ways.

He was loved.

I felt that more and more with the passing of each day and the first day was unbearable. I hated that love. I resented The City and its affections. I quickly became a jealous god and raged against those who failed to worship at my altar.

There was no knowing what he was. His presence in my life was a storm of confusion. I wanted him dead, but knew that could never be. His death would be the death of me. He was a part of The City as much as I was, and he was a part of me.

Sometimes I wondered whether he was the better part of me. I was a dark truth, whereas he shone and lengthened and deepened the shadows I resided within. I ruled The City with fear, and he ridiculed my reign.

My order dissolved and he made of me a joke. He was a killing joke and yet I shouldered the burden of his sins. My prodigal brother. The adored man I should have been, but could never have lived up to.

By the time I understood my love for him, it was too late. Our destinies had intertwined like the roots of two trees. Apparently separate and aloof, but wrapped in an eternal embrace. One falls, both fall.

The unravelling of me was a gentle undulation as he rocked the very foundations of The City. We fought and I won pyric victory after pyric victory. He entertained the masses, using me as the butt of his jokes.

Again and again, his green waves crashed against my tired and embattled body, and I limped home. A little less of me left rattling inside.

She threatened to leave. I said nothing. I wanted her to go. Knew it was the right thing to do. Escape the madness and the coming storm. I knew how it would end, but I could not let her go. I was not brave when it counted the most. I did not fall in the eyes of The City. I fell far harder and far further when it came to being a man. A husband. A father.

On the day they died, I died with them.

Only then did I discover the source of my power.

Love.

They gave me something to live for.

To fight for.

To die for.

In the aftermath of their end, I forsook The City, and I did what I did the best. I hid in the shadows. I hid and he came looking for me. And he found me with a startling ease. He came to my sanctuary and didn’t bother knocking.

Later, I would see the truth of it. Not all of it. Since when do we see all of the truth? But I knew then, that he could have sought me out at any time. He could have taken me out of the game. But he didn’t. He played by the rules.

My rules.

He respected me in a way I never knew was possible. And in my darkest hour, he was there.

He did not need to tell me that it wasn’t him who had cut short the lives of my wife and child. Few knew that they were the family of a hero. Certainly, the drug addled gang banger who’d crossed their path had no idea. I knew he was not responsible. I also knew that he’d handled the situation. Done what I could not do. Meted out a vengeance I had put beyond my own reach.

I knew. But he uttered not a single word. We shared a silence of understanding together. There was none of his laughter. None of my tears. Only his smile. A smile I’d seen a thousand times before, but never read this way.

He might have been there with me for a single minute. An hour. A day. It didn’t matter. Time stood aside and afforded us this moment. That he was there was all that mattered. I had nothing else.

“I feel incredibly old,” I said at last.

But when I looked up, he was gone. He was not there for those self-pitying words. He was there for me. He was there for the game we had started, but was as yet not finished.

He needed me.

He needed me in order to be who he was and to do what he did. I was his other half, and he was mine. I sat there in my powerlessness and imagined a world without him. I had already imagined a world without me. I was there right now. I had nothing to live for and I was rendered as nothing.

I was done.

I was done until he dragged me back into the game. A passion play for the masses. A dance between good and evil. The struggle of right and wrong. The beat of two hearts as one. The pulse of this mixed-up city.

We are the two voices that speak to the self. Dark and light. Without us The City would have no conscience.

My heart is no longer in the game, and he is the driving force now. I am spent and I am tired. But old habits die hard. And in the end one of us will die hard and the other will fall with him. For now, I accept his embrace, and I understand that his is a selfish need. He will not let me go. He cannot allow me the peace of death.

He’d miss me too much.