Alan Moore - Jerusalem

how the world appears to dance with youth and shape itself to youthful expectation and requirement, at least to the young. At seventeen the gale-tossed trees that fringe his many roads are making supplication but to him and Lambeth is his ornament, meaningful only when included in his gaze, not there if he’s not. Women of the borough make their beauty visible exclusively in his vicinity, a colour which they emanate beyond that spectrum readily discernible to other men, apparent solely to the chosen pollinator. Hedgerows fruit with breasts miraculously at his passing. There are secret tide-pool lilies opening in lace undergrowth along his path as though he’s Spring itself, brimful of birdsong and forever on the bone with pretty windfall arses everywhere. He has more sperm in him than he knows what to do with and the planet circling about his axis seems to share the same promiscuous excitement, shooting lightbulbs, telephonic apparatus and the annexation of South Africa in glossy rivulets across the mundane counterpane. The hands of history are deep in sticky pockets, rummaging, and Britain rules a moment which it has mistaken for the globe. Even in Queen Victoria ascendant as Empress of India he sees all the components of a subsequent decline, even if one not culminated in his lifetime. There will be resentment; massacre worse than Bulgaria; futile Satsuma rallyings against inevitable change; ghouls dressed in newspaper who wait a little further down the empire’s as yet only partially unrolled red carpet. Grinding rhythmically against the ancient and incurious alley wall, wearing a squeaking breastplate made of girl and a tight belt of legs, he is exultant in the mechanism, throws his head back barking at the stars and knows the future’s jests and injuries to be already acted. Standing in a hammering South London downpour is the ruffian John Vernall, rumoured to be touched, aware that all the individual droplets in their pounding vertical descent are actually unmoving, are continuous liquid threads that reach from storm-front down to street in long parabolas through solid time. Careening like some Hindu god or stroboscopic photograph amidst the static crystal floss, only the motion of his mind in the concealed direction makes it rain. Nothing, excepting the involuntary forward momentum of his consciousness from one half-second to the next, transmutes the angry martial statuary of a pub yard into the yapping brawl with settled scores and noses blossoming to bloodflowers. The process of his attentions turns the sky, and otherwise the clouds and zodiac are still. Rogue Elephant Boys, unafraid of anybody, swerve in their stampede to keep out of his way for fear that his condition might be catching, terrified lest they end up as human spiders more contented with the vertical than with the horizontal, railing from a rooftop about arseholes, lifebelts and geometry. He strolls between the bloody, arcing billhooks of their confrontations unconcerned, a prescient pigeon strutting carelessly amongst the dropping hooves and crushing carriage wheels. The ructions and the razors cannot kill him; cannot hinder him in his eventual appointment with the tulips and the looking-glasses, fifty years from here and in another town, another century. He’d like to meet a Spring-Heeled Jack, one of the phantom clan prolific in the city throughout the preceding decade, leaping flea-like over barns and middens with their fireball breath reflecting in the circular glass lenses of their eyes. Even should they prove to be marsh-gas or else Pepper’s Ghosts, theatric spectres conjured in an angled pane, still he believes he’d find an easier berth in that outrageous troupe than with the flightless company abroad upon the avenues and bridges, harnessed by the flattened limits of their Ludo-token days. Sore pimples bubble in the creases of his nose and dirt silts on the webbing in between his fingers, a saliva-born black residue cast up by near-incessant self-pollution. Beer is the brown blanket that he pulls over his head to muffle a cajoling world on those occasions when he feels his tender age, when understanding raw apocalypse in every, every, every instant is too much for him. At night he hears the herald angles bellowing fierce imprecations in their queer exploding language and he huddles with his daffy sister, who can hear them too. “Don’t cry, Thurse. It’s not you they’re after.” While this isn’t true it sets the bird-thin fifteen-year-old’s echoing cathedral mind to rest, at least until the next time that the builders who knocked up the sun dance on the roof in thunder-boots and shout their terrible imperatives. They’re after everyone, that’s the plain fact of it, but save their energies for those who are not deaf to their deranging voices, him especially. Sometimes he looks for solace on the pleasure-hills, amidst the million lamps and cancan thighs of Highbury with all the other freaks and acrobats, and even there he hears their typhoon remonstrations telling him to bed this woman but not that one, telling him to hobble sixty miles northwest or shin a hundred feet directly upwards. Unsolicited they show him tableaux from a little further down his individual fleshy tunnel as it worms its way into futurity. There is a marriage in a fine hall with a builder watching from the rooftop’s crest. There is a grandchild born then born away, and even when he’s dead, when everyone and everything are dead, he knows that

the old warhorse charges naked on a final highway, baby-ridden under gradually migrant galaxies. The doomsday ramblers pause less frequently along the featureless rock ribbon to make camp and feast on their decreasing fungal rations, spitting out the optic pips in hope of thriving Puck’s Hat colonies as food caches for their eventual homecoming. When they approximate sleep, Snowy settles for a bed of stone and curls his knobbly spine about the infant mumbling in her wolfskin bag while space and time are steadily unpicked above. During the daylight miles it is apparent that the Earth has cloud once more, furled ochre cellophane which May surmises may be chlorine in an admixture with methane. During dark the half-moon multiplies into a Deco abstract wreathed in vapour, with its light a spectrographic halo-stain on evening’s filter paper. All this change and distance, Snowy thinks, and they’ve not left the Boroughs. Little Cross Street and Bath Passage are still down beneath them somewhere, albeit in a state of chemical and geological deterioration. They continue. When the sack of Mad Apples is finally all but exhausted they experience what first seems to be a mirage born of starvation, a peculiar mirror-fluke of the great alley’s atmospherics: racing down the barren strip towards them from its far end comes an old man with a baby on his shoulders. So exact is the reflection that the travellers half-expect an imminent collision with some monstrous pane hereto invisible, both knocked unconscious, leaving a Daguerreotype of their spread-eagle impact printed on the glass in feather-residue. They are surprised, then, when their doppelgangers turn out to be as substantial as themselves; turn out indeed to be themselves on the return leg of their legendary journey. Both the Mays dismount and hug each other while the old men merely shake each other gruffly by the hand. “Well, now. How has this business come about?” “It’s hard to say. It strikes me that the end of time is like the last day of a school term, when the non-essential rules may be somewhat relaxed and minor paradoxical infringements are occasionally permitted.” “Did you reach the end of time, then?” “Oh, most certainly, but you’ll appreciate that it would be improper of us to convey more than the scantest details.” “You don’t want to push your luck with all the paradox and that?” “That’s it exactly. I can tell you that you’ll do all right for Puck’s Hats, though. Only a few weeks west of here we’ve lately passed the place where you will shortly spit your last few seeds out, and there’s a fine patch of fairy-blossoms already established. Some way further on you’ll find another, probably resulting from the spat-out eyeballs of the colony just mentioned, and so forth until you reach the point where I am now and find yourself explaining all this claptrap to a slightly younger fellow. It occurs to me that we have possibly had our behaviour controlled by Bedlam Jennies so that they may propagate their species to the very limits of spacetime’s duration.” “Put like that it sounds like an outlandish notion, but upon reflection I’ll allow that it provides a stronger motive for our visit to the end of time, which until now has only been to find if such a thing is there or not, and what it looks like if it is.” “Oh, it’s a sight, you can be sure of it. By then, of course, the mass of things is gone and taken with it all the gravity. Likewise the nuclear forces are by then retired and put to bed, but still, for saying there is very little substance it’s a most substantial show. Ah, well. We’ve dallied long enough, and I do not recall our conversation having had a great deal more to it than this. Might I suggest we shoulder our respective babies, taking great care not to mix them up and thus cause an insoluble controversy, following which we shall both be upon our separate ways, as I recall this puzzling but not unwelcome incident.” The two Mays, who have been conversing quietly throughout all this, are lifted back up onto their respective steeds. After an unexpectedly emotional farewell both duos once again continue with their journeys, bare feet slapping on the causeway’s rugged stone, heading in opposite directions on their tightrope over time until in only a few hours of distance they are mutually invisible. Progressing inexorably towards the end of everything, the end of even endings, Snowy’s nominally earlier incarnation asks his passenger what passed between her and the other May during their unanticipated meeting. “I made sure that I remembered everything she told me so that I could say it back correctly by the time I’m her. The most important thing she said was, ‘We have come back from Jerusalem, where we found not what we sought.’ I asked her what she meant, but she just shook her head and wouldn’t tell me.” Pounding down the hard miles to finality, Snowy considers this. Other than an obscure suspicion that the comment might have some connection with the same Professor Jung who failed to fathom Lucia Joyce, he is no nearer to a resolution by the time he and his rider reach the paradoxical expanse of Puck’s Hats that their future selves have told them to expect. They dutifully eat the last of their existing rations, spitting out the pretty eyes before they go on to collect a sack-full of the mature blossoms that those seeds will grow or have already grown into. Dining upon impossibilities the old man can still picture how