Alan Moore - Jerusalem

he goes wandering from his Fort Street home, uncertain of what year it is or where he lives. Shuffling lost down Moat Street he remembers it as being filled with water once and wonders when they had it drained. The fish must have looked dreadful, flopping and asphyxiating in the gutters. It all changes in a wink these days, everything vanishing or turning into something different. Following a path of least resistance, a well-trodden street-plan crease, he rolls up Bristol Street and down Chalk Lane where there are poppies squirting out of brown-gold crevices in the old burial ground’s limestone wall. Across the way the turquoise paint on the Blue Anchor’s signboard peels and curls beguilingly beneath the sharpened Wednesday morning sunshine, every detail of its scabby surface limned in fire. He knows they’ve got a lovely girl behind the bar there at the Anchor, beautiful Louisa who he got his oats with down in Beckett’s Park a while ago. He only hopes his missus never learns of it. Beneath a fleeting cloud of muddled guilt he shambles on through summer, heading for Black Lion Hill and Marefair down the dappled lane. Carthorses nod in passing to each other on the blinding cobbles and he weaves his passage cautiously between them to the sanctuary pavement outside Peter’s Church while all the crumbling monsters of its stonework gape at him in outrage. When he makes his way along a hairline alley to the building’s rear the Saxon chapel seems to him ablaze with moment and significance as if he’s looking at it for the first time or the last, and in Narrow Toe Lane he finds he cannot see for tears although he doesn’t know what they’re in aid of and within a dozen paces has forgotten them. White cumuli slide down the sky like foamy spittle over Green Street. Underfoot the York stone flags carry the scars of ancient rivers, fossil fingerprints that he supposes were made several hundred million years ago when only trilobites and ammonites lived in this little row of terraced houses, slithering out to sit and chat on their front steps during the warm Precambrian evenings. The ancestral buildings, crouched and tired and leaning on each other, have an aura of familiarity as if the millipede of his true form expressed through time has on countless occasions doubled back and forth upon itself along these weathered slabs, and it occurs to him that he has family here. Doesn’t he have a daughter living somewhere round these parts, a girl named May? Or is it May who died of the diphtheria when she was just a baby? Snowy trudges past a sequence of ill-fitting wooden doors, their numbering up in the high eighties, and at last finds one he thinks he recognises right at the far end, Elephant Lane, down that way, next door to the builder’s merchants with the painted gate. Unpolished and thus slowly darkening, the old brass doorknob squirms reluctantly against his sweaty palm then yields. The heavy slab of pitch-stained black swings open with a whinny from its hinges to reveal a passageway, its weak illumination and tea-brown obscurity conflated in the old man’s senses with its bouillon scent of rising damp and sagging flesh. He sees the human odours, smells the light and cannot recall ever having done things otherwise. Shutting the door behind him without looking he moves down the cramped hall, calling out a speculative greeting to the darkness squatting halfway up the stairway but the dark has clearly had enough of him, like everybody else, and doesn’t answer. Nobody’s about, his entrance to the silent living room confirms, excepting for a cat that he believes might be called Jim, asleep before an unlit fireplace, and three bright viridian meat-flies that he doesn’t know the names of. A south-facing window ladles rays across the room in strictly rationed measures, smearing yellow honey on the glazed bulge of a flower-vase or along the varnished curve of the piano-lid and suddenly it comes to him that he’s known all of this before, the cat, the flowers, the angle of the sun, the same three nameless flies. He’s known this moment all his days, down to its most excruciating detail. Part of him has always been here in this half-lit cubicle while he’s been otherwise engaged with swaying on the Guildhall’s slates and walking in a trance to Lambeth, visiting his father in the madhouse, copulating on the riverbank or being sick over the little folk. By the same token he knows he’s still there in all those other places even now and doing all those other things, still wavering on the brink of that tall rooftop; that short woman. He is teetering now upon the speckled hearthside rug, finally overcome by vertigo at the sheer drop of his own continuity. Exhausted by it all he sinks into a battered armchair and the window-shine behind him turns his thinning hair to phosphorous. The chained dog in his stomach growls reproachfully and he’s forgotten the last time he ate, along with all his other vital details. This is where he dies, he understands that. These walls that enclose him are his last ones and the world beyond this square of carpet is a world he’ll never tread again. He feels remote from his own creaking frame, hungry and aching in the chair, as if his circumstances were all something happening in a play, a well-known closing act repeated line for line, night after night; life a recurring dream the dead have. The old nuisance can’t tell if he’s really here, the unnamed flies impatiently anticipating his demise, or if

he’s sprinting through the final night that has no dawn with his dead grandchild yanking at his ears to spur him on. Above, the void disorganises. Heat is fled save for those vestiges at the reactive cores of cosmic halo objects, vast accumulations of dark matter only rendered visible by a decreasing pulse of infrared until this too is ceased. The muffled metronome of padding feet on stone is their accompaniment in straits where universal darkness and frigidity are made inseparable; where black is just cold’s colour. Doggedly they journey on, spacetime’s last spectres running blind towards a limit that they only know is there because they’ve met themselves returning from it. This is the one certainty they cling to through the endless, lightless distances, and it only when they are beginning to doubt even this that from her human crow’s nest May reports a fleck of radiance at the vanishing point of their all-but vanished highway. By the time they’ve drawn a few millennia closer, this scant spark has swollen to contain the empty skies above in their entirety, a shimmering butterfly corona from horizon to horizon, a display of shifting marbled hues which the two pilgrims have all but forgot the names of. Stood against this dazzle where the road appears to end abruptly in an iridescent nothing is what seems to be a single silhouetted figure of unusual height and girth, positioned as though waiting patiently for Snowy and his granddaughter to reach it. Both adventurers can feel the hairs raise on their necks as simultaneously they reach the same conclusion with regard to the obscure shape’s probable identity. They’ve each thus far reacted with a studiedly dismissive flippancy to the idea that their peregrinations might entail such an encounter, but with its reality almost upon them the old man and baby girl alike become uncertain and, for the first time, afraid. May’s voice beside his ear is an uneasy whisper. “Do you think it’s him?” His own reply is hoarse and strangled, a constricted rasp he’s never heard before. “Yes, I suppose it is. I had a lot of things to say to him, but I’m so frit I can’t remember what they were.” The confrontation they have privately longed for and dreaded, whilst a terrifying prospect, is significantly less unbearable than the alternative of turning round and running back the way they came. They carry on in their approach of the inevitable form which looms at the conclusion of their path, naked into that presence, and John Vernall grows increasingly confused about which segment of his caterpillar continuity he’s currently experiencing. All his moments fall upon him in a pack, coterminous, a fugue as complex and disorienting as his sister Thursa’s compositions, bringing an unprecedented yet somehow familiar sense that