The Whole World Smiles

It wasn’t me. 

It really wasn’t me.

I never wanted this.

He made me do it.

He made me…

This city wakes up to its own darkness. During the day it lays dormant and brooding. It’s pulse is barely audible as it crumples into a waking coma. The day-walkers spill in on the trains and the underground, acting like this is real. They do their jobs, they buy their lunches and then they flee from the awakening of this dark titan.

Oh, some stay for dinner and drinks. A little walk on the wild side to provide them some excitement. A brief escape from the humdrum lies of their tawdry existence. But they scurry away before the real fun begins, and when they read the stories that provide a brief glimpse of the real city? They dismiss them as one-offs. The media’s attempt to glorify crime and scare honest, law-abiding tax payers into consuming more of their half-truths. 

Well, I’ll tell you this much. Those people are not honest and I doubt they pay all their taxes. They’re blood suckers. Come in the day when the patient is sleeping, to rob him of his watch and the sparsity of cash enfolded in a wallet as battered as the patient is.

The real city is a solidity of dark promise. The real city is a hungry maw of fear. There is no sleep to be had in the depths of the night, because that’s when the city awakens and it stalks the streets looking for unsuspecting victims. Seldom does it take the transitory day-walkers. Instead it looks for its own. It’s better that way. More apt. More convenient.

Never did I utter the words that described the place that claimed me, but I knew well enough. I knew because I felt it deep within. This place surrounds you and then it creeps forth. By the time you realise it’s in your blood, you’re already poisoned by it. You are claimed and you will never be the same again.

There is no hiding in your bed. The darkness of this place knows. The city is a god and if you hide from it, it will come looking for you. A dark destiny that will not be denied. Little did I know of my destiny and the sacrifices that were necessary to unleash my true potential. The rituals that must occur in order for my real self to be released and come forth and take my rightful place atop this festering and stinking rat hole that is my home. Has always been my home.

My dear mother would often tell me to smile. Things weren’t so bad if you smile. Smile and the whole world smiles with you. She did her best by me did mother, but her best wasn’t good enough. She saw the fear in my eyes and she could not help but pity me. I felt the hostile weight of her pity as much as I felt the tawdry shame of my fear. Always pity, never love. This isn’t a place where love can readily exist. Here you have to fight for love with every fibre of your being. You have to be your love and smash it into the object of your love with everything you’ve got in order to make it count for something. 

“For chrissakes, Jack! Smile! You’re curdling the milk in the bowl with that asshole face of yours!”

“Sorry mother.”

“Mother. Who the hell says mother. Honestly, I doubt you’re mine. Now you be quiet, you hear me Jack? They don’t like hearing you. They don’t want to be reminded that what they’re doing can make something like you. You were a mistake. All of this is a mistake. I don’t know how I ever…”

Mother did her best. She really did. She did her best in circumstances made too difficult to ever escape the filthy hamster wheel she found herself on. She fed and clothed me and she only ever raised her hand to me when I deserved it. She was even tempered and not given to taking her rage out on her only son. A son born out of wedlock, but not from the ancient profession she resorted to after I came along. She told me that much, but never who my father was. 

Mother had another life before me. She was something else. Someone else. She never talked much about her life before our time together, but she said enough for me to know that she was a day-walker. A day-walker who had a momentary lapse by virtue of her easy virtue and bad taste in men. 

You see, mother was an addict. We’re all addicts or one sort or another, only some of us fixate on a socially acceptable high. Or we hide our addiction well. Mother had a soft spot for men. Not real men, but the fantasy of them. The fairy tale she chased again and again was corrupted by the poison of this city. Her Prince Charmings were tall, and in the dark of her small and squalid bedroom, she could pretend that they were handsome. 

For a while, they took her to some place that made her reality bearable. For an unbearable moment, she was a princess and she was reminded of the promise of her life before it was torn apart and she was cast down into the shadows. 

All mother wanted was for a good man to take her away from the pain of her fallen existence and carry her off to a forever land. Then one day she got her wish. Only, she wasn’t careful with her wish, and that wish of hers was executed by the hand of a punter who was in the thrall of his own addiction. What he saw as he continued beating my already dead mother to death, only he will ever know.

I waited several hours in my special hiding place before I dared crawl out to see what I already knew. There is a silence to death that speaks of the nothingness that awaits us. Mother lay in a red pool of that silence. A broken angel wearing the wrong face. Her skin was already cool and that coolness shamed me far more than my fear ever had. It reminded me that I was a piteous creature. But still I took my place by my mother’s side and I lay with her for the rest of the night and the following day. 

That was all the time I was afforded. As the next night approached, I left that place and never returned. My mother’s expired existence spat me out into an uncaring city, and now I had to learn how to survive. Or die. The choice was mine.

If you look hard enough, you will find what you seek. My mother must have told me that one too. There was no one else that could’ve. I found work and I carved out an existence that only hurt a bit. That was more than I deserved. Far more than I deserved. 

At night, I wandered the streets and learnt how to be invisible. There was no sleep to be had in the city’s loud night. The city bayed with an insatiable hunger and the sound of it terrified me. Besides, I had no bed. Bed’s in the city were at a premium, and mostly for recreational use.

As I walked through the endless night, I cried. On those first nights after mother left me, my tears were visible and they made me visible. Tempting jewels for opportunistic thieves. Those thieves took from me with an energy of violence. I had nothing of worth to give them, but they found my value and took it all the same.

Their violence taught me to hide. I hid my tears, and now, as they rolled down inside me they found a way into the pit of my stomach and sickened me. Those inner tears formed a lens over my frightened eyes and I saw far more of the city than most ever do. I saw more and more and my fear only grew until I became one of its rats. Scurrying this way and that in an attempt to avoid the coming end. A frenetic existence racing towards the violent inevitability of a sudden end.

Then I saw him.

I saw him and everything changed.

The stories preceded him. The legend that came from nowhere. One day he was nothing, the next he was eternal. He became in an instant, conjuring himself from the darkness so that it seemed he had always been there. Larger than life, but never larger than this city. Nearly, but not quite. He was one half of it. The other half was yet to make its debut.

At first I did not understand. But then, how could I? I was not fit to comprehend what was at play here. I was not worthy. His was a reclamation. An invasion of the shadows. He didn’t come out of the dark. He was the dark. 

How utterly brilliant!

I was in awe of him. Really, I was in awe of what he had done. I was awakening to possibilities that had been denied me all my life. These were not my possibilities though. However hard I smiled, the world did not see my smile. I was the same old Jack. I was nothing. I was Jack Shit.

Then he came to me and everything changed. He brought me my destiny on a bent and warped platter. He opened the door and he shoved me through it. And nothing was ever the same again. I’ve been thanking him for what he did ever since. Showing my gratitude in the only way I know how.

That night, I had an inkling of what was coming, even through the smokescreen of my fear. There was something emboldening about the dank air and each time I drew it into me, I grew a little bigger. Unfolded. Unfurled. I was readying myself for something, but what that something was, eluded me. I smiled a lot that night, and I felt something alien awaken in my heart.

Hope.

Walking from pool of light to pool of light, my curiosity got the better of me as I left the relative safety of the neon signage of a pawn store. There was movement above. Something along the ridge of the roof. The movement edged away from me and I was drawn towards it. Stepping into an artery of the city. The bleak and foreboding darkness of an alley. Now I was looking straight up above me and saw silhouetted a struggle. The theatre of it enthralled me even before I realised that it was him. He was there in the flesh. Flesh made darkness. And in his hands was a symbol of his struggle. Crime made manifest. But it was more than that. This was a ballet of torment. He was compelled to do this. To be here and rage against the injustice of this place. His was an eternal fight against the imperfection of human existence. He was attempting to become more. Denying the limitations of his fragility and daring to be.

I gazed upon a man made god. A god made in his own image. He was a dark possibility and my mind raced with what this could mean for me.

Then it happened.

He happened.

He smote the unworthy figure, and we locked in an embrace of gaze for what seemed like an eternity, and for Jack it was. This was the end for Jack. All true beginnings require an end. He made an end of the petty criminal and baptised me so I could live again.

The falling man became a mess of a corpse as he hit the ground, and I was bathed in the last of his life. It blinded me, and as I scrabbled at my eyes so that I could see again, he was gone.

And so was I.

There was a numb moment of transition as I stumbled away from the smashed and broken body, back out into the light of the city. And as I was illuminated in the eerie glow of the neon lights I saw the true nature of my baptism. Raising hands no longer my own. Painted red by a god. Feeling the mask of death upon my face. Something broke within me. 

I broke.

I screamed, but there was no sound. Like my tears, my scream was hidden from the world. All I afforded the world was the rictus grin of my rebirth. And in that maddening moment, Jack did what he did best. Jack did what he always did.

He hid.

And in Jack’s place there was me.

And I knew how to really smile.

The god I encountered brought me forth to my rightful place in this city. I am the other half to his vengeful darkness. I am the light. He is dour and serious, always looking for the wrong in everything. I am the fun that this place has been crying out for. He is reluctant and masked. I am the showman. I am going to shake this place up and make it see what it’s been missing.

I am what this city needs. 

And he needs me more than he will ever know.

Always has.

Always will.

Without me, he is nothing.

Things are going to change in this city. I will bring the music of my laughter and everyone will dance to my tune.

Even him.

Especially him.

We were meant to be.

We will dance he and I.

Lovers locked in an endless waltz.

Lovers.

I will always love that dark god. I will love him more than he ever deserves. I will worship him, for I see him as he truly is. No one else will ever know him like I do. He is the only thing I have ever truly loved. If only I can make him understand that. If only I can turn the pity he holds for me into something more. Something worthy. 

Something we can share, as we share this dark gift of a city. Two warring gods playing with humanity on a whim. Two brothers sharing our favourite toy.

The prospect of what is to come fills me with laughter and I smile a smile that will never end. I smile for the man who made all of this possible.

My smile is for him and only him.

I paint my face with his smile, as he painted it with sacrificial blood.

And my fear is gone. 

Everything is gone.

I am empty and I need to be filled.

The city awaits.

He awaits.

Time to play.

I smile and I know this city will smile with me. What choice does it have?