Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Dez Warner stares, his eyes those of a hot and snorting horse, at tonight’s catch with his magnificent erection going in and out of its mud-coloured cunt. He’s sizzling like a god or an unstoppable machine and the all-powerful chemistry that’s in his head reduces everything to this, the back seat of his motor, to this situation he’s created. When he’d driven into this enclosure it got worried, didn’t it, and started all that stuff trying to make him see it as a person. Telling him its name was what had got him started with the smacking and the punching, all of that. If you don’t know the name it could be anybody, couldn’t it, the one off Countdown , anyone at all. It could be Irene. Even on the wedding night when both of them were pissed she wouldn’t let him fuck her tits, she wouldn’t suck him, nothing like the stuff you get in mags or DVDs, nothing like that. Nothing like this. All his awareness centres on that tingling last inch of his mighty ramrod, squeezing up inside a frightened fanny, feeling so electric that it must be glowing like the sticks they have at festivals or like a red hot poker when the end bit looks translucent. He can smell the sex, the fear, the tangy and exhilarating soup of it, oh yeah, oh yeah. He’s crossed the line with this and can’t go back, he knows that, but this new thing, this is everything that he was always meant to be, not marching into banks with a crash helmet on and strongbox handcuffed to him, trying to look like Terminator for the girls behind the counter, that’s not him. This , this is him, the king of night, the king of fuck and it’s so easy, why don’t people do it all the time? White noise behind the eyeballs, there’s a sort of faulty strip-light flicker and he’s still got pop-up phantoms at the corners of his vision but he doesn’t care. He owns this creature’s life. He can do what he wants. It’s like a doll, it’s like a fly you’ve caught but better for the crying, better for how scared it is. He’s stiffer than a bolt, never as big as this before and pumping up and down like mad. He can’t remember the exact point when he’d made his mind up to put it out of its misery when he was done, or even if there was an exact point. It’s more of a continuum, to be fair; a sliding scale where he’s not come to a decision as such but he knows it’s going to happen, definitely. Just the thought of it excites him and he’s banging harder but his nerves are kicking off like popcorn and he’s trying to shake the feeling that there’s someone else there in the car with them. The window-glass is grey with scalding breath. Dissolve to satellite perspective.

Underneath its shredded wedding dress of cloud the naked globe sweats electricity, stale beads of light most concentrated in the armpit cities, trickling thin in breastbone valleys. Limned with glitter the black map below persists in its unhurried process of evaporation, borders that were only ever topographical conveniences made irrelevant by new communications media, an ongoing negation of geography with threatened and belligerent nationalism churning in its backwash. Gym-fit viruses take longer run-ups to the species barrier. Unkempt taxonomies of novel and more finely graded madnesses are diagnosed, while in Berlin, Chancellor Merkel’s wrapping up the opening ceremony of the Hauptbahnhof as Europe’s biggest railway station when a stabbing rampage is commenced in the attendant crowd, more than two dozen persons wounded and six of those critically so. It’s discovered that one of the earliest knife-victims is HIV positive, to further complicate the tally of postponed fatalities. Newly accreted islands of volcanic matter rise unnoticed. Insert footage, black and white.

An angry smudge of chalk and charcoal, Freddy Allen draws a line across the street plan with his passage. Streaming in a dishwater stop-motion queue of doppelgangers the indignant spectral tramp splashes unnoticed through brick barricades and bollards, through the gaseous blur of fleeting automobiles and the ground-floor flats of the disabled, a fog bullet, die-straight in its murderous trajectory. Evicted in his flickering wake the dislodged ghosts of fleas seek new accommodation, vampire jumping beans in search of other unhygienic apparitions, plentiful in these parts. Raging thunderous and splenetic as he stumbles, even in the muffle of the ghost-seam his unbroken howl of ghastly epithets and curses is the unrelenting rumble of a derailed freight train hurtling dirty through the sleeping district, dragging a funereal scarf of smoke and spitting hot sparks of pejorative. With panting locomotive rhythm Freddy damns the lot of them, rapists and rent-collectors, councillors and curb-crawlers alike, all vicious fishes circling the depleted bait-ball of the neighbourhood. The anthracite which keeps his fury stoked, he knows, is mined from bile directed at himself and the appalling thing that he once nearly did, the guilty weight that keeps him mired in this monochromatic wraith-sump and eternally unworthy of the colour-drenched emporia Upstairs. He fumes and fulminates in an expletive storm-front, rattling amongst the sulking residential slabs named after saints and over atrophying streets sealed off from traffic to deter the sex trade. As a ragged chain of paper dolls cut out from folded newsprint Freddy is reiterated in school classrooms, in conspicuously shriek-free moonlight corridors, exploding from prefabricated walls adorned with genial crayoned grotesques to surge down Scarletwell Street in an avalanche of countless flailing limbs and spite-contorted faces.

Cutting off the blunted bottom corner of Greyfriars House he’s like another line of grubby washing strung across the empty court within, flapping and damp, and in his billiard projectile rush he at last understands the full weight of the Master Builder’s loaded gaze, earlier on at the ethereal snooker parlour: it’s him, Freddy. He’s the trick shot, the archangel’s cannonade, skittering on the Boroughs’ dog-fouled baize, the full force of that mighty circumstantial cue propelling him, and all to save this skinny little girl? She must be so important to the play, a black or mistily-remembered pink at least, but why would he, would anyone suppose she wizn’t? That’s not right or fair, dismissing her because of what she does, because she’s not a doctor’s daughter. Everybody wiz a baby once and innocent of all their future. Trembling ectoplasm born of wrath and tenderness wells up in soot-creased sockets as the long-cremated indigent swirls into Lower Bath Street, rippling like eyestrain through pitch dark a foot above the sagging tarmac and, as ever, with no visible means of support. Stretched silver beads pass through him like neutrinos as it starts to rain. Resume full colour and cue montage.

From this vantage, features of the natural landscape have been superseded by abstraction, where the spooling ribbon rivers are replaced by fiery canals of routed information, sluicing from one lock-gate server to another and oblivious to mountain, ignorant of sea. Data that previously drizzled escalates to an extreme weather event. The fathomed knowledge rises past its hastily-drawn plimsoll line and populations find themselves out of their depth, clutching for straws of dogma or diverting novelty as they commence their surface struggle at the rim of an e-maelstrom. Seen in overview Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square is an old-fashioned colour blindness test card, swimming with pale tinted dots despite the pounding rain. Fledgling Pope Benedict the sixteenth makes his first major appearance in the homeland of his predecessor, tannoy mutter sputtering against the downpour as he references Pope John Paul’s prayer of some twenty-seven years theretofore, asking that the Holy Ghost descend and change the face of Poland, this plea widely held to be more instrumental in dismantling the Soviet Union than the acted permutations of the world’s implacable equation. Species disappear and new discoveries are introduced with the breakneck turnover of soap-opera characters. Newfoundland crows develop secondary tool use, implements for modifying implements, and on Kilimanjaro’s slopes uncounted lightning bolts sow precious tanzanite, fulgurant echoes in a cobalt glass. Conflicts move on from place to place like homicidal drifters, changing names and altering appearances while yet retaining signature brutalities. Theories proliferate. Repeat interior, night.