— Fiction —

There Will Be Bats: P. T. Anderson Writes the Dark Knight Sequel

        BRUCE DANIEL WAYNEVIEW
Ladies and Gentlemen, I’ve traveled over half our multiverse to get here this evening. I couldn’t get away sooner because Solomon Grundy came out of Slaughter Swamp and I had to see about it. Let’s just say that the scienticio-physico experiments of Monsieur Tesla are tithing me an income of five thousand dollars a week from the thrones of South America alone. Let us not speak of the Scare-crow, who I have only given what you good people might call an old-fashioned pelvis breaking. Discipline is the bread of life my friends and I shan’t forget for a moment that a repentant sinner shall walk again in a green valley.

So—Ladies and Gentlemen—if I say I’m a Bat-man you will agree.

WAYNEVIEW pauses and smiles for the briefest of moments.

        BRUCE DANIEL WAYNEVIEW
Do I look like a cop?

WAYNEVIEW gives a forced chuckle.

        BRUCE DANIEL WAYNEVIEW
I would very much like to be your city’s vigilante and be lord over a sunless empire of blind, diseased, shrieking terror-mammals. Also, I will rule over the bats.

Which is why I’m here, my friends. You have a great chance here—but bear in mind: You can lose it all if you’re not careful. Out of all men that beg to rule the night and jump out of the shadows in a deluded attempt to gain some measure of closure for a childhood trauma that will never, never-ever heal, maybe one in twenty will be billionaire bachelors; the rest will be speculators—men who gained their powers surely through their own incompetence with chemicals or radio-ation and not a debilitating psychic wound—speculators trying to get between you and your potentiality for a culling of the hobos—to get some of the urban legendarity that by rights comes to you, the fine people of this fine city of Little Gotham.

Even if you find one twisted, obsessed avenger that has money, and means to spend the next thirty years trying to suture a bleeding ulcer on his fell soul, he’ll maybe know nothing about being a god-damn Bat-hyphen-man and he’ll have to hire out the job on contract—I think you know that means the Brothers of Green Lantern and rumors aside, ladies and gentlemen, I’m hesitant to speak ill of my fellow man. But then you’re depending on a Blue, omniscient contractor that’s trying to rush the job of securing justice and with it your posterity so he can get another talking space-mule on his Emerald-Ring roster just as jack-quick as he can. This is the way that this works.

An OFF-CAMERA VOICE INTERUPTS, LOUDLY; WAYNEVIEW holds his composure.

        OFF-CAMERA MALE VOICE
What the hell you want with bats?

        OFF-CAMERA ADULT FEMALE VOICE
Uh, sir, l-like I told you, sir, this—this is just a sandwich shop. I think you, uh, want to speak to someone at City Hall …

        OFF-CAMERA LITTLE GIRL VOICE
Just buy a goddamn sandwich already, mister!

        BRUCE DANIEL WAYNEVIEW
That’s besides the point, friend. I do my own Kevlar and Bat-o-rangs and I have my own butler and a possibly endless line of expendable boy-soldiers ready to be sacrificed to my endless war on crime; and I have my own men that work for me, work for me and they are men I know, men who can disappear if need be. Believe me I have clowns who have bid on that very business for me. I make it my business to be there and see to their work, although I can’t promise I’d be there for their death. I don’t lose my utility belt in the hole and spend months fishing for it; I don’t botch the crippling of our civic felons and let corpse-beef in the hole and ruin the whole lease.

This is my partner, D.G. He’s a flexible circus orphan and let me tell you that there are more of those than you might fancy.

REVEAL, AT THAT MOMENT, young DICK GRAYSON. He is standing behind WAYNEVIEW and looking at the group that is OFF-CAMERA.

        BRUCE DANIEL WAYNEVIEW
So you see this is a family business. Yes, I’m fixed like no other company in this field and that’s because my Aero-Bat-machine has just come in—I have a string of tools, some of which are compensation for the death of my parents, I’ll admit, all ready to put to work. I can load a Bat-mobile onto the roof of your commercial district and have it here in an Irishman’s hour.

I have business connections so I can get the body armor for the many stabbings I’m sure to encounter, not just from the parasite which lives upon the body of your precious civic flower but from the ill-thought out asides on my Christian person that are sure to come when I drop down from your ceiling into your lives, perhaps to enjoy one of Mister Graham’s onanism-thwarting crackers or a Coca-Cola—such things go by friendship in a rush like this and I shan’t take it amiss if my cowl is molested mistakenly, it was made with the help of a freedman, Lucius Fox.

And this is why I can guarantee to start scaring a superstitious and cowardly lot and put up the cash to back my word, and more importantly continue my war against evil in a world that I believe with some justification to be created by a wicked tormentor god.

I assure you, ladies and gentlemen, whatever the others promise to do, when it comes to the showdown they won’t be there.

Especially that god-damn Johnny Kryptonian, who I have on good word is a Red socialist space-caitiff who brought the Chinese-pox to our fair shores. He is no “Super-Man” but some species of slovenly ground-sloth from a foreign star, or so they say. I hope you haven’t minded my good old-fashioned plain talking about him, it, whatever it really is.

Also, did I mention my parents are dead?