All characters belong to Alan Moore and DC Comics. Please see closing credits. Standard disclaimers apply. Please send feedback. New Frontiers Luna
[1965]
There were Big Figure's boys, in the rain. They'd armed themselves with lethal junk: a rusty reel of chain, a broken bottle, PVC pipe, a baseball bat studded with scabby glass. And a switchblade in every pocket. Around them, the harbor was empty and shadowed and hopeless.
Daniel flexed his fingers inside the leather gauntlet. "Maybe nobody told you," he said, "but your time ran out a while back."
They glared at him, eyes ringed with war paint, unsmiling but plainly amused. "Talks like John Wayne," one of them said, tapping a wrench against his palm. "There's twelve of us, man. One of you."
"Mm. Hardly seems fair."
One of them, jazzed, babbling something like All right man enough fucking talking fuck I mean all right, lunged forward and threw a left hook. It was a good, powerful punch, but it missed by half an inch, and while he was still off-balance Daniel swept one arm out casually and flipped the guy face-first onto the asphalt. "Fuck, man," the guy gasped, clawing at Daniel's ankle. Daniel shook him off, kicked the wind out of him. He stayed down that time.
Daniel turned and faced the rest of the gang again. "Who else?"
All of them. They came at him in one push. It was lousy strategy--they jostled to get in front, elbows and weapons clashing, and gave him space to move, space to work. But the one with the wrench was right; there were more of them than he could handle. Daniel took a blow to the head that made the night ring red around him and stepped backward to steady himself, and felt the slippery wood of the old pier under his boots. He wasn't badly hurt, he was hitting hard and it looked like three or four of them were down for the count. But his nose felt broken, and his breath was coming harder and harder.
The rusty chain lashed through the air toward his head. He caught the chain in both fists and pushed it forward into the throat of the kid who'd swung it, held it across his windpipe, and drove him back against the rest of the gang, knocking a couple of them down. It bought him a minute, not much more. His heel struck the edge of the pier. The wind lifted his cloak, sent a chill up his spine, as they pressed toward him. Yellow light sparked off their knives.
"Big Figure's gonna own this town," said the one with the wrench. "Say bye bye, Birdie."
And then Daniel's ship came in.
The boys stood their ground, but their painted faces showed shock in the lights that skimmed over the oily river. It was beautiful. Archie made a happy splash as it settled on the surface, and Rorschach leapt out of the hatch, landing lightly as a cat on the pier. He nodded once to Daniel and stood, hands on his hips, ready.
Daniel smiled so that everyone could see it, below the cowl of his costume. "Goodbye," he said.
They threw themselves full-force into the fight. The element of surprise made a better weapon than anything you could carry in your hands. Through the blur of sweat and rain and adrenaline, Daniel glimpsed Rorschach grabbing one of them by the nose, hoisting him more than an inch off the ground and letting him go. The guy came up clutching his face and running.
It was messy, ugly, and over almost too quickly. They caught their breath and tied the unconscious ones to each other, cuffing their hands behind their backs. Daniel crossed the street to the pay phone. He called 911 and gave them the address. The operator asked for his name.
"I am the Nite Owl." He was still smiling, though there was a trace of blood in his mouth. "And Rorschach is with me," he added, and hung up the phone.
They boarded Archie and took off, following the curve of the river around the rim of the city, rising past skyscrapers and dirigibles, through the clouds, beyond the reach of the city's glaring lights. There was no moon. The stars were everywhere.
"This is a good night," Rorschach said.
"Yeah. These gangs..." Daniel loosened his goggles and wiped the lenses dry on the lining of his cloak. "They think they're so tough that the whole world should capitulate to them. They're too ignorant to imagine how anyone might outwit them. They didn't imagine you, and that came around to kick them in the ass."
"Hmm." Rorschach came over to stand beside Daniel's chair, hands in his pockets. "Not tough. Toughness implies that they stand for something. They don't. They exist on pure animal meanness. They'll destroy anything they can't use, and destroy each other when there's no one else left. They're probably falling all over themselves to deliver one another to the cops as we speak." He paused, his reflection hovering in Archie's eyes. "You did them some damage before I got there."
"I did make a dent, didn't I?" Daniel laughed. They both did. He was just beginning to be sore as the adrenaline faded, pain nudging the edge of his consciousness. He drummed a sloppy paradiddle with his fingers on the console. After a while, he said, "But they'll be back. If not them, ten kids exactly like them. Big Figure has--"
"Deep pockets," Rorschach suggested.
Daniel snorted. "And a long memory." He took a last look at the limitless sky, easing Archie into the descent. "It could make a significant difference, pooling our efforts. We ought to do this again."
Rorschach gave him a look that had to be a smile, even though the mask made it impossible to be sure. "Condition this city's in? I'd say we must."
"It's a deal." Daniel turned in his chair and offered his gloved hand. They shook on it, as Archie broke the cloud buffer.
The city waited for them below, open and wet and gleaming.
Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.
--John Wayne
[1975]
He was dreaming of--something--when a door slammed somewhere in his house.
Daniel jolted upright in bed, snatched his glasses off the nightstand. He slipped them on and was halfway to the bedroom door before it occurred to him that maybe he shouldn't stumble straight down into whatever trouble had come looking for him. Half a page in that morning's Gazette had been devoted to an editorial by the police commissioner, blaming costumed heroes for everything from KT-28 addiction to rush hour traffic. It wasn't the best time to call yourself a hero. If someone had traced his identity--but he didn't think so. Still. He went back to the nightstand for his pocket laser, and moved carefully, his footsteps almost silent on the stairs.
A dim blue glow spilled into the hallway from the kitchen, and he let himself breathe out, though he could hear his pulse in his ears. No drunken mob would be this quiet; not many professional assassins would stop for a beer. "You're four hours too late for a midnight snack," he called out, palming the laser as he rounded the corner.
Rorschach turned from the open refrigerator to face him.
Something was wrong.
Something was wrong with the way Rorschach stood, his shoulders hunched and rigid, his hands clenched around nothing but air. He was standing like a man climbing a barren mountain, fighting the frigid wind. He reeked of smoke and lighter fluid, sweat and flame. There was blood on his coat--a lot of blood--and he didn't seem to be bleeding.
Daniel supposed it was a measure of how far he'd come from the world of his father that not one of these things alone would have alarmed him very much. He reached backward to flip the overhead light on. "Hey," he said, as gently as he could. "Uh, Rorschach. Is everything--is there something I can help you with?"
"Blaire Roche is dead," Rorschach said.
The wrongness had infected his voice, each word rasping raw against the next. It had to be eighty degrees that night, but the temperature in Daniel's kitchen fell like an ax.
"The little girl--oh. Jesus Christ. That's, uh, that's dreadful. Did you just find out?"
"Few hours ago."
"Jesus," Daniel said again, and let himself slump against the door frame. "I'm sorry."
"Sorry?" The pattern on his mask shifted slowly. "A child, taken from parents who loved her and treated her as if she was special. Not knowing what's happening to her. Not knowing why nobody comes to take her home. Frightened. Humiliated. Violated. Butchered. No peace even in death--"
"Rorschach! Stop it." Daniel ran a hand over his face, through his hair, squinted past his fingers at the tile floor. "Listen, I realize 'I'm sorry' is an inadequate response, all right? I just don't know what else to..." Against his will, he pictured it. This little girl. The muscles in his shoulders and upper arms tensed, and waited, but there was nothing to hit. "Did you catch the son of a bitch?"
Silence.
No, not quite silence. The motor inside the open fridge grew steadily louder, a wasp's nest hidden in the room with them.
Finally, Rorschach said, "Yes."
"Good."
He looked at his fists, lowered them. "Yes."
There must have been something else to say. He kept wanting to ask, Are you all right? and What happened? But they were such stupid questions. And something in his gut warned him that if he heard the answers, he would wish he hadn't asked. So he pushed himself off the wall and circled the periphery of the kitchen as he'd circle a crime scene, past Rorschach, to the fridge, and took out a couple of beers. He spent more time than he needed looking through the drawers for a church-key, passed the first bottle to Rorschach, and took a gulp of the second as soon as he'd opened it.
Rorschach didn't drink, didn't even glance at the bottle in his hand. Daniel shut his eyes and had the sensation that the room was spinning, that his house had come unmoored from the block and was drifting up into the smoggy sky. "At least the ordeal's over," he said.
"For whom?" That strange new voice again. "For the dead child or the man who slaughtered her? Maybe. Not for those of us who have to continue living in this world. This city. Disintegrating every year. You must see it."
"I don't--"
I don't look at it that way, he was going to say, but Rorschach said, "You don't. You refuse to look it in the eye. I stare it down. More dope on the streets, more violence, more madmen. Monsters. Consuming more innocent lives. We--I try and keep up. Racing against human depravity, paddling our rafts against the tide. Never catch up."
Daniel held the sweating bottle up against his forehead, against the throb of an approaching headache. He opened his eyes and looked at Rorschach. Something about the thick descent of ink over his face was more upsetting, more wrong than the stink and the blood. "Okay. If, if you believe that--what are you going to do, man? Give up?"
Rorschach laughed. It sounded like he had a mouthful of ice and grit. He set his beer down on the table with a clunk, adjusted the lapels of his trenchcoat, and tipped the brim of his hat down half an inch.
"Never," he said. And he walked past Daniel to the basement door, opened it, stepped down into the waiting darkness.
Daniel stood for a while, staring, before it occurred to him that he should close the basement door, and lock up. Or he should call the police. Or he should crawl back into bed and hope that he'd wake up in a few hours, overheated by the morning sun, and say to himself, Shit, I had the strangest nightmare--but he'd never been so far from falling asleep.
The listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
--Wallace Stevens
[1985]
Laurie was always glancing over her shoulder, but nobody came after them. Of course nobody did--three million dead. Two more missing people wouldn't so much as blip anyone's radar. Still, every now and then Daniel would catch his own eye in the rear view mirror and a shiver would sweep through him. It wasn't always easy to believe they'd left New York behind.
The day after Christmas they drove north up the California coast, the cliffs to their left sheering away to the sun-dazzled Pacific. They'd left Archie behind in a bunker Daniel owned outside Sacramento. It had broken his heart a little to leave the ship. He'd had the sense not to say so. There was too much traffic, they were hardly crawling, and his hands were tight on the wheel.
"Damn," Laurie said.
"What?"
"I was hoping we'd have to recharge before I had to pee." She smiled at him, brushing a lock of bleached hair back from her cheek. "You think we could find someplace to stop?"
"Sure. It might be a little while before we can get off the highway."
"I promise not to explode."
They hadn't discussed how long they'd be on the road, or even, in anything but the vaguest terms, where they were heading. Daniel scanned the bright blue exit signs, threading the car over to the right hand lane. In twenty minutes they pulled up to a spark hydrant, in front of a squat rest stop so out of repair that there were still a couple of old gasoline pumps to one side of the empty parking lot. Laurie looked at them suspiciously and bolted for the ladies' room. He watched her go, the flash of her long legs crossing the gravel, and something rolled over and sighed in his chest. A smile crossed his face as he juiced up the car.
The inside of the little rest stop wasn't much better than the outside; there was sawdust scattered on the floor and a pervasive smell of burnt coffee. He got a cup anyway, and a packet of Laurie's tobacco, and handed his money to the teenage girl behind the counter, who frowned. "This is a twenty?"
He wasn't sure if it was a serious question, or if that was just the inflection of her speech. "...Yes?"
"I have to get you change?"
"All right?" He blinked at her. She rolled her eyes at the indignity of it all and slouched off toward a back room.
There was a New Frontiersman lying on the greasy countertop, and he couldn't help reading its headline: two-inch tall letters blaring HAS THE WORLD COME TO AN END? Yes, he thought, and no. He turned the pages with one hand, cheap ink coming off on his fingertips, not really looking, not quite looking away--and Rorschach's name snagged his eye like a hook.
Explosive new information follows from the hero Rorschach's personal papers, conveyed expressly to the New Frontiersman, blowing the lid off the liberal sickos who've abandoned our national and global security to appease their commie cronies!
Daniel read the paragraph three times before the words sank in. The journal.
Oh, God.
He held his breath and scanned the column.
If reading this now, whether I am alive or dead, you will know truth: Whatever precise nature of this conspiracy, Adrian Veidt responsible.
There it was, in black and white.
Daniel gripped the edge of the counter, concentrating hard on not throwing up. They'd published this. Put it out there in front of the world. By the evening news there would be a complete uproar. The White House would--the Soviets would--
He drew a deep shuddering breath and looked at the article again. The print was tiny and tightly packed, and most of the page was filled up with Rorschach's borderline-nonsense about skyscrapers like tombstones and women like prostitutes and love like Coca-cola. They must have just cut and pasted paragraphs onto the page, with no idea what they were really looking at. And Adrian's name there like a land mine waiting to be tripped.
Who prints this thing anyway? Daniel wondered, and then: Who reads it?
Even if anyone did, even if anyone could tear themselves away from the raw power and tragedy of the stories still coming out of Manhattan to flip through this rag, even if anyone actually read past the madness and saw the j'accuse--
Adrian had been right. Right again. Rorschach was no reliable witness.
"...Hey, uh, Sam?" Laurie, coming out of nowhere, tapped her hand lightly against his thigh. "Are we ready to get out of here, or what?"
Daniel flipped the newspaper shut as fast as he could, trying to make his face a blank, wishing he had his mask on. "I'm still waiting for my change," he managed to say.
She wrinkled her forehead. "You look awful. What is it?"
"Nothing." He fought down the bile rising into his throat, forcing his mouth into a tight smile. "I think the glare off the water was starting to get to me."
She leaned in against his arm and saw the paper, her eyes narrowing in on the headline and widening again when she looked up at him. "I can't look at this stuff," she said. "You shouldn't either. We've already seen too much of--oh--are you crying?"
Until she said it, he hadn't realized that he was. Just a little, a touch of salt water on his lashes. He wiped them roughly on the cuff of his shirt. "Headache," he said. Would you mind, uh, driving for a little while?"
"Sure. Of course. I've been sleeping most of the morning anyway, I should put in my time." She covered his hand with hers, the keys cupped between their palms. "Don't read the paper, okay? It won't do you any good."
Whether I am alive or dead, you will know truth.
It wouldn't do anyone any good. "I got your cigarettes," he said. "Let's just go."
He thinks he's seen
some visible trace of some absent thing.
Knows he won't talk about it, can't.
He arrives home to the small winter pleasures
of a clothes tree, a hatrack,
his heroine in a housedress saying hello.
- Stephen Dunn
[1995]
After several years in Las Vegas Daniel was still surprised to find himself happy calling it home, this bright knot of a city with so many fringes, so much room for adventure. He liked living in a city that wore its strangeness, its madness, on its sleeve. He liked patrolling the sulfur-lit streets that shot off in every direction from the Strip, seeing girls in showgirl makeup waiting in line at the bank, being able to go out at one in the morning and order prime rib while Laurie had an omelet.
They were at their usual table; she was complaining cheerfully about the newspaper column that kept calling her Kitty Hawk, and her face went white. White as all the Arctic. He twisted around in his chair, his pulse picking up speed, and scanned the other diners, trying to figure out who she'd seen. It took him a second to notice the TV screen mounted over the bar.
Adrian Veidt smiled down at him, fatherly lines framing his eyes, a touch of silver at the temples, smiled forcefully down over a caption reading, Veidt announces '96 candidacy. A shot of a crowd waving signs, another of President Redford waving from the tarmac beside Air Force One, and back to Adrian's face.
The volume wasn't high enough for Dan to hear anything. He strained to catch the words, to understand, but he only heard Laurie say, "The bastard. The bastard."
With effort, he tore his gaze from the screen. "I, I can't believe he'd do this."
"Adrian fucking Veidt," she said. She was still holding her fork above her plate, poised, paralyzed.
"I don't even understand why. I mean, politics, straight politics--it can't be anything but a game to him. He's got to have an agenda... I..." He pressed a hand against his forehead, as if he could settle his thoughts that way, with Adrian's blue stare boring through the screen and down the back of his neck. "I can't even imagine it."
"I can," she said, and trembled in a way that could have been cold, or fear, or rage.
It was one of those moments when he remembered that she'd been in Manhattan at midnight, to the scene of Adrian's crime, had walked with Jon among the ruins and corpses with that thing looming above them. She never spoke of it. He reached for her hand.
She said, "We have to kill him."
His eyes met hers across the table and he could see a rare hardness in them, a deadly seriousness. Her round lips had thinned to the width of a whiplash. He could see the definition of her body under her blouse, the collarbone's sharp angle to her long neck. She was still trembling.
"Kill him?" Daniel said.
"Yes." Her fingernails dug into the spaces between his knuckles. "Someone has to."
"I don't think you know what you're saying," he mumbled, though he was sure that she did.
"Dan," she said, and yanked her hand away, clapped it over her mouth. She hadn't slipped up on his name, in public, in a decade. She took a breath and tossed her head back. "What are we going to do, stand by and pretend that we don't know--that he's the brilliant philanthropist he pretends to be? That he isn't--that we never--"
"Shh," he said. Her voice was rising steadily, and at least one waiter was looking their way, preparing for the scene, the thrown glass, the embarrassing exit.
"Adrian Veidt," she said, clenching her jaw so hard it must have hurt. "Clean hands, pure heart."
He wanted to say yes with her. He wanted to lead her from the restaurant, to flee with her into the desert, stockpile weapons, formulate a plan. He wanted to see Adrian broken at his feet, and when he shut his eyes he did see it, almost tasting the victory.
"Do you think we could?" he asked her, and let his hand fall under the table to stroke her knee. "Do you think he hasn't already anticipated that we might try?"
Her chin dropped, her hair swung forward and hid her eyes from him, and he was grateful he didn't have to see her face crumple as she contemplated this.
"The bastard," she said again.
"Yeah." He hated the resignation in his voice. The vision of desert and blood was a lot better. "Laurie," he whispered. "Remember the Russians in Afghanistan, and Richard Nixon with his finger on the button--"
"Nixon." She shook her head once, sharply. "Nixon was a goddamned Boy Scout, compared to this!"
"I know that."
"Then how can you?" She stared down at the tablecloth. "How can you talk like this? He'll win, you know. He'll win. People will listen to what he says, look at his picture in the magazines, they'll watch this bullshit--" She flicked a hand to indicate the TV. "People will believe in him. How can we just allow that to happen?"
Daniel leaned back against his chair and a pain shot up through the hollow spaces in his spine. He felt his age for the first time in an age: hair graying, joints stiffening, time eating away at the edges of his senses and his strength. As old as he'd felt in his forties. In Las Vegas he'd almost forgotten.
"He saved the world, once," he said.
She snorted, holding back a laugh, or a sob. "He's a murderer."
She must have been remembering Manhattan. He was remembering the way blood, Rorschach's blood, had looked on the snow. The words on his tongue were unforgivable and he regretted them already as he spoke: "If it comes to that, so was Jon."
The way she looked at him--it was worse than being punched. She stood up, shoved her chair into the table with a shaky hand, and turned her back on him. He waited for her to storm out.
"Take me home," she said.
He took her home.
We have seen the City of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved--
Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.
--G.K. Chesterton
[2005]
"Thanks, boss," the cabbie said, and peeled out from the curb, splattering Daniel's shoes with muddy snow. Daniel jumped back a step and watched the traffic trickling away down Third Avenue, the sun pouring light but little warmth down into the canyons between skyscrapers. He'd been catching himself doing that this since they'd gotten into the city, stopping and staring like a tourist, drinking in the views he used to take for granted. He knew better, but he couldn't look away.
There were fewer airships up among the spires than he remembered. Lithium cells got more expensive every year; on the taxi's radio he'd heard an expert panel agree that Americans should start considering a return to fossil fuels. Hollis would have liked to hear that. Daniel blinked a few times, the sun's afterimage scalding his eyelids, and went into the hotel.
Exhaustion hit him in the elevator, so hard his knees nearly buckled, and he yawned all the way down the twelfth floor hallway to the room. He let himself in, sitting down on the end of the bed with their suitcases spread open at his feet. Laurie wanted her green silk jacket, the copy of Anna Karenina she'd never finished reading, the old bottle that still held a faint trace of her mother's perfume. Daniel got as far as unfolding one of her sweaters before he fell back against the mattress, one arm sprawled across her side of the bed. The ceiling glazed over before his eyes.
They'd created a complete new set of aliases and numbers for Sloan-Kettering, paid more than one bribe to skip the waiting list, risked everything about their lives to try and save hers. But these days the tubes and needles that riddled her body seemed to suck out more vigor, more vitality, more hope than they pumped in.
She'd been smoking around the clock since she was sixteen.
These things happened.
He wanted to weep, but his eyes were dry. It was impossible that he could lose her. It wouldn't sink in no matter how many times he looked at her and winced at the prominence of her bones. Impossible. Instead he thought about the city, how it had changed and not changed since he'd called it home. Traffic still crawling, and the old neighborhood reduced to rubble.
He remembered how Rorschach had broken into his house to warn him about the mask killer. Long gone, like Hollis, and Sally Jupiter, and the Comedian. And Jon had never been heard from again; when they spoke of Dr. Manhattan on the news, it sounded like they were talking about something dreamed. Even Adrian, his plane downed over Kansas --though Daniel still suspected that he'd staged that, too, that there was a final act in Adrian's passion play and they were all unwittingly performing to this day. Even the damned cancer could've been part of the show.
His throat felt constricted; he gulped for more air. There had never been any mask killer, and they were all gone, anyway.
They'll destroy anything they can't use, and destroy each other when there's no one else left, he heard Rorschach saying, forty years and forty blocks away.
The only costumed adventurers active these days were kids, doing it for the kitsch value, videotaping and soundtracking every move they made. Nobody meant anything sincere and direct anymore; nobody was as nave as he'd been, believing that he was actually capable of changing the world. Of saving lives.
I did make a dent, didn't I? he'd said, and Rorschach had laughed with him.
Daniel wrenched himself up from the mattress to sit straight, flexing his fingers a few times to shake off the ache of what he was trying to pretend wasn't arthritis. It didn't really hurt, not half as much as listening to the rattle invading each breath Laurie took. He started in on the suitcase again, setting aside the things she'd asked him for, inhaling the scent that rose off everything she'd worn, although maybe that was only in his imagination. Or his memory.
Nostalgia.
One day, not too far in the future, nobody alive would know the things he knew. The Ancient Mariner, he thought, and laughed at himself. His laugh sounded terrible in the quiet room, hollow and bitter. It sounded like Rorschach's laugh.
What are you going to do, man?
The Tolstoy book was buried at the bottom of the bag, alongside his old, beaten copy of Under the Hood. Both volumes were heavy in his hands. Nobody would pick Daniel's mask up, or Laurie's, and wear them after they were gone. Nobody would remember. That seemed impossible, too, impossible as death, but he suddenly felt cold and certain of it. The kids starting out these days, taking to the skies--Jesus, they would have been born the year half Manhattan was killed. They'd never have lived in an America protected by a superman, or imagined nuclear warheads suspended just above their heads. That was his world and he was going to be the last refugee from it.
Give up?
The rooftops outside the window gleamed in the winter daylight, all soot and silver, the new tower standing tall and bright where the Garden had once been. A building like a tombstone. There ought to be a better monument. There ought to be some way to preserve the lost souls, to transmit the truth that had dismantled the bomb, decimated the city and executed his oldest friend.
Rorschach would say--had said--never surrender.
The answer came to him as easily and gracefully as Archie sliding through the heavens. He reached out and took a pen from the nightstand, curled his aching hand around it carefully. Maybe he was grasping at straws.
He stretched out his other hand and found Laurie's jacket, the silk tingling under his fingertips. Somebody else ought to remember her.
He wrote the first words of his memoir on the flyleaf of Hollis's, beginning right after the end.
From a chaos raging sweet,
From the deep and dismal street,
Toward another kind of peace.
Toward the great emptiness.
--Patti Smith