Incunabulog

Crusader

I am the dark shadow you dare to look at.

“There he goes!” you shout, pointing up at me with excited faces, cameraphones too slow to catch me as I leap from rooftop to rooftop, in pursuit of some deadly criminal. I will catch him, you know, because that is what I do, and I am the best at what I do.

I give you all something to look up to. I give you all a mysterious and forbidding angel of vengeance to make you feel safe under an uncertain sky. You want to feel safe, don’t you?

“Go get ‘em!” you shout at me as I vanish away into the dangerous night, cape billowing in the wind, mask forever hiding my true identity. Your exclamation mark is a punch in the air – that one moment in the day when you feel powerful and tall and in control. For I am all of those things, and through me, so are you. But you don’t want to be me, do you?

You’d rather be safe.

You enjoy reading about me, catching the bank robbers and the muggers and the child molesters and the terrorists and the gun runners and the drug dealers. Catching the scum the world seems to be clogged with these days. Their beaten faces line the insides of the commuter trains, a rogue’s gallery of Otherness pasted on the front of every newspaper. One less axis to worry about in this evil world. You don’t care how I catch them, or where I go to do it, so long as I do. I understand.

I am the memory of your father, that giant of childhood, fierce and unforgiving, reaching silently for the leather strap.

Believe me, I understand.

But there are always the other crimes. The killings that don’t make it to the front page, if they make it to the paper at all. Night Edition – one ‘graph update from our reporter at Police HQ. Two bodies in a flat. Nothing else is said.

The other crimes. The ones the Commissioner never asks me to solve. The ones he looks me right in the eye and never mentions. You don’t talk to your buddies at work about those, do you?

We all have our demons. I kill yours, but who kills mine?

But you don’t want to know that, do you?

It’s a small price to pay, isn’t it? Your silence. Your tacit consent. Your complicity. For the right to look up in the night and know all is well and right in the world? Just so long as you can pretend you don’t know about it.

“There he goes!” you shout, and you shout louder this time, so loud that your eyes are closed and the whole world can hear you, because that’s what you want, isn’t it? I am the dark shadow you don’t dare to look at.

I am your shadow.

Fuck you all.

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