GCN's Evening Report with Mike Engel, December 7, 1998:
"…First off tonight, we begin with fresh news from Washington, as insiders say the Oversight Committee will not reroute any funding to what they call the Gotham City problem, this in opposition to hard lobbying on the part of government and private sector voices. The move, though widely anticipated, comes as a major setback to the Administration, particularly Vice President Gore, whose humanitarian advocacy for Gotham failed in Congress and whose legacy is now perhaps tied to the President's more than ever before. What the suspected 'Declaration of No Man's Land' will mean for the Vice President and his presidential aspirations, after this…"
Lex.
Years ago.
Years ago he was young. Like they all were. He was happy and vibrant. And the city was his.
Imagine it. To come from nothing. And then to have everything.
Lex came from Suicide Slum. The worst Metropolis had to offer and still offers to those too weak, unskilled, or enfeebled for anything higher. Oh, the Luthor family was rich once. But that was a very long time ago. It was young Alexander's father and mother who lived the dotage of their ancestor's failure here in the Slum.
He determined to get it back.
He found his mother crying one night. He had come home after dark to the empty tenement, dank paneled walls and worn-flat carpeting the color of pea soup. She was sitting in the Davenport, sagging leather and her ancient flower dress rumpled around her. One fat arm supporting one fat head, the only flawless thing about her was the perm, brown and stuck in place for these long years. There she sat, kind of sunken into herself, batwings for arms and round hands covering her face. She was a full body crier in a family of repressors and as she cried she shook, or sort of hobbled with each breath. It was pitiful. He knew it all too well and hated it every time he saw it. Probably she was happy once. Before. Above. At a time when there were perfect things. But again. That was then and this was very much now.
He ducked back behind the wall and pressed up against it. His whole body wound up. He felt his legs, his thighs, tighten and it was minutes before he realized he needed to breathe. His shoulders went up. He daren't move: she might hear the slightest thing and then thunder over and wonder why this nobody persisted in hearing her shame.
Lex waited until his breathing normalized. And until he found himself staring at the worn out carpeting, listening to her. Listening to himself. The beats of his heart and, he imagined, the electrochemical surge in his brain. He listened until he couldn't anymore. Until he looked at his own hands. His feet. His legs. All of himself. Until he couldn't take it anymore. The way she was. The way father was. This whole situation. If you could even call it such a cold and clinical thing.
He fled to the front door. Bounded out of there like a rocket. Down the stairs. Onto the street. Five blocks down to the newsboys. He ran fast. And he did not stop.
In five minutes time he was outside Carmazzi's, the corner store, immigrants running it and doing their best because ain't that America. Carmazzi's, where the idiots preyed on the greedy and stupid, flipping cards and running bets and guns and other darker things for masters higher up the chain. He swore he'd get the Newsboys together. Do what he needed to do.
He stopped running at the crosswalk. He breathed hard and looked up. In those days the rest of the city wasn't developed enough for light pollution, you could still see the stars. The whole world.
His world.
Lois.
He called her name and still she waited.
Well. Waiting was really such an ugly word. What was the counterpoint? Something not quite as passive as waiting yet not as charged as rebelling. She'd been doing that pretty well her whole life. Well, her whole life so far. She reached up behind her: the headboard was a bookcase and stuck almost in the middle between Capital and Brave New World was a thesaurus. Dollar ninety-nine at the Book Loft, yellowed and worn. She plucked it out from its place and looked for—
"Waited. Tarried?" she said. Made a face. No. "Hung on. Hmm."
"Lois!"
"In a minute!" Her voice cracked as she yelled. God. Mom's got Dad, Dad's got Mom but really who's got who? She didn't have an answer. Maybe there was a word for that.
Lois Lane was nineteen and commuting to Stonybrook. She was inquisitive. Acquisitive. She behaved as if the world was her oyster, and maybe it was. Things sort of tended to happen for Lois. Not that this made her any less intense, or dogged in her passions. She liked to tell Lucy and the rest of the Sunday Mimosa group that she came by it honestly. The military. That life. She respected it. How could she not. It was Dad's whole life and Mom loved him enough to support it. And while she was very much her father in some ways, the military bearing was not her thing. No. Lois preferred something a good deal more open. She found it in journalism.
So there she sat, or laid in this kind of Roman recumbence on her bed. Writing out a letter in her comp book to the editor of the paper, Nimbus. And what the hell kind of name was Nimbusanyway, who was Collie trying to impress?
Under hair the colour of red wine she had this permanent little smirk. Writing fast with this really killer ballpoint, writing so fast she watched her words jumped around the ruling, some scrimshaw EKG for penmanship. Finally she was done. She held the note in both hands.
"Dear Collin," she read and made her voice that low register of disappointment and judgment with which she liked to fool herself. "I was disappointed to read Lisa's latest excuse of an opinion column on objective reporting on the Board of Trustees meetings. Surely such an opinion, specious, and hinging on the supposition that there's objectivity left in journalism, pretends to be the remnant of Hearst's age. Then, we all could suppose ourselves above the fray. Outside Roosevelt's beloved arena and able to judge it all dispassionately. But we should know better. You can't assess a situation unless you're inside it. Heisenberg was onto something. To a large extent objectivity is both an excuse and a crutch for those who lack the constitution for hard analysis. Or for inconvenient truths. On this Earth every act is a political act. Our function as journalists, even at this institution for apparently higher learning, is to report on those acts. It means doing so from the trenches. So be it. I no longer want to work for a group of distant effetes who cannot see the value in the elbow work, the grime and grist under which true reporting lies. So I'm resigning."
She breathed. Looked at the note and then set it back on the duvet. Stared at it another minute and then looked up.
He was in the doorway, in his Dress Blues. Leaning on the jamb, arms folded, and the creases of his old face in a smile.
He said, "Good."
Then he was gone.
She watched the doorway a moment longer. Cracked a smile.
It was the first time he ever complimented her. The first job she ever quit.
And the last.
Clark.
Years ago Clark was young. He still was young. But he felt in his heart of hearts that he was old. Old and somehow…distanced from his adopted world. Even by the lofty exchange rate at which he judged his biology to be ahead of these humans—
No.
These people—
No.
His people.
The projection from the capsule called him their son. Her son. He remembered it all too well. So well despite the fact that it was, what, ten years gone by now. What a decade. Packed with stories and encounters so wild he doubted even Jor-El could contemplate them. He thought about that a lot lately. Here at the turn of the millennium human society seemed intent on having a self-effacing moment, judging itself, though not too harshly, on its achievements. He liked to imagine he knew better. For all the damage such a line of thinking could have on someone with his powers, he imagined he viewed this society, this human planet, as better than perhaps what it was.
We think we're so small, in the end. In the eyes of the universe.
We're nothing. And they sit here arguing over annoyances on a blue planet they're unconsciously killing.
Father.
Who does that remind you of?
He thought about that a lot too. Reaching out through the ether to speak to a man dead for what Clark had figured to be centuries.
He had taken it upon himself to investigate the capsule that brought him here. In it he found information in his native language about the society he'd left behind. Or been allowed to escape. Coded information from a hundred thousand worlds, including Krypton itself, hundreds of thousands of years of cultural, political and military history.
In the throes of curiosity, if there was such a thing, he interfaced with the capsule once. This was ages ago. After the tornado. Before Metropolis. He interfaced and learned it all.
He didn't feel any smarter for the exercise. The archive poured into his brain the total sum of its knowledge and analysis. The exercise probably had made him the smartest man on the planet. But It certainly had little application, he felt, to parade up and down Fifth Avenue with the knowledge, for instance, of Thanagar's opulent Fourth Interregnum and attendant Social War. Or the sundering of Kandor, Krypton's own, by a supercomputer in humanoid form. Or even the stories, apocryphal even in the Archive memory, of the destruction of the old universe and the splitting of its remnant halves into two worlds: one light, a genesis of life, and one apocalyptic dark.
It was years after this that he faced those worlds in person. That he became what you might suppose he is today.
A Man of Tomorrow. A Man of Steel.
Superman.
He said the name out loud, and it floated on the wind, and was gone. He breathed.
And focused.
He was a hundred miles above Metropolis. Floating, not moving except for the imperceptible solar breeze he supposed he felt in space.
Down the coast, a hundred and thirty-one miles from Metropolis, the Clocktower in Gotham City was ringing in the new year. 2000, celebrating perseverance, that city being readmitted to the Union after a year in the wild. Elsewhere, they were shooting off fireworks in Centennial Park: a public party for all, food and fellowship at the dawn of a millennial tomorrow. He looked down and saw Lois in the park. He smiled and watched. Bundled in a North Face, a tape recorder in one hand, a full tumbler of whisky in the other, getting reactions from the mayor, the occasionally interesting Virgil Brinkman. Jimmy next to her in some smart grey trenchcoat, snapping photos on a vintage Kodak.
He smiled. He wasn't accustomed to this level of reflection. Certainly it was more relaxed than he had been in a long time. He imagined that it was what levity felt like. Peace, in spite of everything.
And he thought of Jor-El again.
Father.
His father, surely the greatest of his kind, sent him to this planet knowing only so much about its customs and its people. But he took a chance.
Jor-El believed in them.
Clark breathed.
For his own part he did not know anymore.
Because down there in the maelstrom of life was—
Squinting, he saw Luthor, a flute of champagne in one hand and Brinkman shaking the other. Smiling his Luthor smile. Laughing his Luthor laugh. He remembered.
Only in October of the last year, three months and yet an eternity, the man had announced from his Quonset in the middle of ravaged Gotham that he was running for President.
Time had seemed to stop when Clark heard it.
He had known in that instant what the outcome was going to be. Luthor accomplishes most of what he sets his mind to, Father. The only failure for him is that I'm still alive.
So here he was. Superman. A savior of humanity, as far removed from humanity as he guessed he could be. A savior.
And not sure they needed—
Or wanted—
Saving anymore.
Superman, he thought, meant something. The symbol on his chest, and the morals in his heart, meant something. It was all some people had.
But.
He'll win, Father. Won't he.
Why have I become so attached to these people? Why do I think of them in this way. I was raised as one of them.
But.
I feel—
He couldn't shake the question. Not in the face of abject possibility. Because Superman knew the truth. The reality of it. He knew there were other worlds. He'd seen them. Been to them on a thousand adventures with the League and others. Those fantastic people with fantastic powers that allowed them to see such things and such places. Other planets, other universes, other Metropolises. Eventually, other versions of himself. He never paid the idea much attention until now.
He had imagined on one of those worlds that he and Luthor, for all their ups and downs, might have been friends. He had imagined that Luthor put that prodigious mind to use curing cancer, or taking humanity to the next step in their evolution. Clark hoped for a great many things. But that was then.
And this was now. And it was in this reality that he and Luthor were enemies.
He wished it was otherwise.
He started to lower himself to the city. In a moment he heard the crowds drunkenly bleating out Auld Lang Syne.
He forced a smile.
This world.
His world.
It was going to be a long year.
On December 8 1998, then-President Clinton went on national television to address some of the issues surrounding Urban Decay in The Heart of Our Great Nation, infrastructure and its attendant funding needs, and the concomitant problems of rising population and crime rates. If you weren't paying attention it was supposed to be a fairly routine speech, as speeches go of course, perfectly bland, perfunctory, meaningless. A reach out. A band-aid, a salve. All the synonyms. Except those living in certain areas of the East Coast knew pretty well what it was about.
Gotham.
You had New York, and you had Boston, and you had Metropolis, and if you wanted to show off how hard you thought you were, you'd count Blüdhaven in there. And you had Gotham.
Gotham. Whose inhabitants laugh at New Yorkers who talk about their tough town. Whose people sneer at Metropolitans bitching about their evolved sensibilities and instead prefer, one Gazette poll found, black coffee instead. But that's Gotham for you. Deceptively simple, but comfortable. It was a state of mind. And a city. Metropolis had the luck of the draw. You could live there and not worry about a thing. But Gotham. People get mugged walking home from work every single day of the week. Even in the good neighborhoods. Partially this was a consequence: certain costumed idiots had driven the criminals and the desperate from their usual dark quarters. The city was changing. Modernizing if you believed in such a thing. Oh it was no Metropolis. What city could be? Sunlight and artifice, you know, aren't all there are to a life. Sometimes the shadows make life interesting. Sometimes you make them home. And generations had. The Waynes were the first, and made their fortune trading fur with the French in the ancestral tidewaters. Later others came. Opportunity was something to be seized as well as created. Families of note, as every city has. Cobblepots and Elliotts and the now-extinct Pinkney line and more beyond. All those years of struggle.
Gotham grew.
And then, one day, it all fell over.
A contagion that devastated the city. Another outbreak that picked up where the first left off—a legacy of death. Repeated impositions of martial law and human rights abuses too manifest to even contemplate let alone prosecute. Survivors cannibalising each other in Knights Stadium as they waited for disaster relief that never came. Geriatrics refusing to leave their homes even as their children lay dying. The talking heads and Late Night couldn't resist. They talked about morals and ethics and carnal forbearance and how that had all gone out the window the day the city decided to entrust its fate to a bogeyman in a Halloween suit.
And then the earthquake. The nail in the coffin. If the freaks and the Bat-Man and the variably effective police force hadn't signed the city's death warrant, the earthquake certainly did. Fires burned for days. Humanitarian aid promised and lied about was swiftly dropped altogether. More martial law. Millions dead. It all happened so fast and went on for so long that the talking heads didn't know what to say after a while.
Luthor sat in Montevideo, and later still Metropolis, watching it all. Watching and imagining perhaps that the quake, or the plague, or some bloodthirsty Girl Scout had killed the Batman and that it would free up the alien for the brunt of Luthor's attention. He imagined he could face the alien squarely now. Man and Superman, after all, doing battle for the ages in this very building.
His tower.
Tallest building in the world. He kept it that way. So he could look down. On them.
Imagine one day looking up. And someone looking down their nose at you.
Well.
That. That was the very last straw.
He leaned back in his chair. Ahead of him on the desk made from a juvenile redwood was his PowerBook G3, a gift from Steve, and a tumbler full of Glenmorangie. He cocked his head. On the PowerBook, the livestream went on, Cat Grant and Glen Woodburn sniping each other over what Clinton could possibly have to talk about, maybe Yemen they said, maybe Dolly the sheep, maybe nothing. Luthor tuned it out, and in a separate window brought up his email. He fired through a quick succession of notes from subordinates, sending back one-word replies to the ones that weren't worth it, and half-sentences to the ones that pertained to the actual running of the company.
Finally, Woodburn shut up, and Grant looked at the camera. Luthor imagined she was looking at him. And he at her. Right at her.
"That's gonna do it for the panel, we now go to the Oval Office, and President Clinton."
The image changed, and there he was. Drawn pale face, leant forward, hands clasped together on the desk in front of him. That characteristic look on his face. Lips pursed in. Eyes ever so narrow.
Luthor scowled.
Clinton only seemed to wait a moment. An eternity, Luthor imagined, as the man pondered whether or not he could continue. Then he spoke.
"My fellow Americans. Tonight I'd like to address some of the problems that have arisen in recent months, pertaining to one of our greatest cities. Gotham City, in beautiful southern New Jersey, is a strong city. A resilient city. One built on hard truths, hard facts, and the steadfast perseverance of the men and women who settled it over two hundred years ago. It's also at the center of a huge humanitarian crisis right now. Over the past few months you've heard me talk here, and to the Congress, about the need to save this city from the plagues and the destruction that's been visited upon it. I don't believe I need to recount the events that led to Gotham's current state, but I do need to reiterate the dire need its citizens face. They're hungry, they're ill. They're dying. Without proper federal aid, there's little we can do to save Gotham. I had hoped, and I had urged the members of Congress to do so as well, that a groundswell of support—goodwill campaigns, grassroots activism, fundraising, calling your representatives, everything that makes our country and our system of government work—would help save Gotham from the waves of negative public opinion. But tonight, I'm sad to report that all of those efforts, noble though they were, have not achieved what we hoped they would.
"That said, it is my job now to report to you, the American people, that earlier this evening the Congress has overridden my veto and passed Bill Nine-One-Nine-Three-Nine, Authorisation for Immediate Cessation of Federal Intervention in Gotham City, to take effect within fourteen days. It's my sad duty to report that this bill is designed to remove both military presence within the city—the lifting of martial law—and humanitarian aid as well. Until such a time as the government can come to a consensus on what aid to give to Gotham City, I'm afraid this is our only recourse.
"But this Bill also stipulates immediate establishment of FEMA relief camps in six locations around the periphery of Gotham City, in order to aid basic humanitarian needs, proper medical care, and out-processing and placement services to affected individuals. To the citizens of Gotham, let me be clear: Your federal government is here for you. Within the next fourteen days I encourage you to take all necessary steps, if you are able, to leave Gotham while you can, and to please do so in an orderly manner.
"In my first inaugural address I said there was nothing wrong with America that could not be cured by what was right with America. I still believe that. I still believe in all of us, and all of you, in order to affect positive change in the world, especially at this uncertain time. I know there are dark days ahead. I promise you we will face them together. And I want to reiterate something else I said all those years ago on the National Mall. Something that has stayed with me ever since: we have changed the guard. And now, each in our own way and with God's help, we must answer the call.
"Thank you, and God bless you all."
Luthor shut the PowerBook. He leaned back in his chair, a dark shadow upon black leather silhouetted against the endless night beyond: a floor to ceiling glass window for a wall. The cityscape gleaming with a trillion winking lights in the gloom.
He came back to himself and looked straight ahead. Mercy, standing there in a charcoal wool coat. Staring at him. Waiting for orders like a loyal dog.
His face twisted a bit. A stone scowl.
"Let's go."
Continued...