Forgive me

The small hours.

Gotham.

Beneath the high-rises lay the slums.

This shantytown was somewhere even police officers would not patrol alone.

The sheet-metal roofs were patched together here and there like scabs on a diseased scalp, with clotheslines, discarded mattresses, and someone's broken sofa wedged between them. A dark brown stain spread across the sofa's upholstery. It did not look like coffee.

The air was thick with a mixture of mildew, spoiled rice, cheap cigarettes, and something sickly sweet, as though something were quietly rotting.

Chen Mo crouched on top of the tallest abandoned water tower.

The tower's iron framework had rusted down to a skeleton. Wind passed through its bones, making a moaning sound like someone blowing across the mouth of a bottle.

He opened the first bag of money.

Hundred-dollar bills, neatly stacked, fragrant with ink.

In Gotham's shantytown, that smell was sweeter than bread, sweeter than women, sweeter than anything.

Because it could buy all those things.

Chen Mo did not empty the entire bag at once.

He grabbed a handful and flicked his wrist, as though scattering fish food.

The bills scattered into green snow, drifting west.

Another handful, scattered east.

Another, to the north.

He climbed down from the water tower and moved slowly across the shantytown's sheet-metal roofs, taking a handful from the bag every few steps and scattering it evenly, silently.

Below lay all walks of life.

In the easternmost corner, a homeless man curled in the gap between a sheet-metal shack and a brick wall.

The original color of his clothes was impossible to tell. He had worn them so long that the fabric's color had worn away, leaving only the grayish white of the fibers themselves.

A small fire burned beside him, fueled by broken boards and old newspapers scavenged from the trash.

The flames were small, barely alive, huddling together in the wind.

His gaze was unfocused, his pupils as large as two dry wells. He had just shot up. The syringe still lay by his feet, a bead of blood clinging to its needle, already dried dark red.

He slumped against the wall, as limp as a rag doll someone had casually propped there.

A trace of a smile hung at the corner of his mouth, a blank smile that needed no thoughts, as though his brain had been washed with bleach.

A green slip of paper floated down from the sky, drifting before his eyes.

His gaze followed it for a while, as though it took him a long time to establish that it really existed.

Then he reached out, pinched the edge of the bill between two fingers, and held it before his eyes against the firelight.

A tongue of flame licked the bill. Its edge curled rapidly, turning from green to brown, then brown to black.

The flame climbed along its edge like a slender, bright red snake.

He smiled.

It was a faint smile, as though he had seen something only he could see.

Hallucinations. He had seen plenty.

Once, he had seen his veins grow out of his arm into a vine that wound around a lamppost and suspended him in midair. Another time, he had seen a cat covered in eyes crawl out of a sewer. Every eye wept gasoline, and then the cat set itself on fire.

So he was quite used to it.

He rolled the burning hundred-dollar bill, slowly and carefully, as though rolling a handmade cigar. Then he casually tossed it into the fire.

The flames suddenly leaped.

The green bill quickly curled into a ball in the flames, its ink giving off faint sizzling sounds in the heat.

The paper began charring at the edges. Franklin's face on the hundred-dollar bill first wrinkled, then blackened, then crumbled.

Two meters away, another homeless man leaned against the wall, wrapped in a ragged down jacket scavenged from a dumpster.

A tear ran across the jacket's shoulder, gray stuffing spilling out like a festering wound. He had been dozing, but the flames' unusually high leap startled him awake. He opened his eyes, the green mass rapidly disappearing at the heart of the fire reflected in his pupils.

He froze for a second. Then his eyes suddenly widened, almost bulging out of their sockets.

"Holy shit! That's fucking money!"

He sprang off the ground like a dog whose tail had been stepped on and lunged at the fire.

He thrust his hand straight in, his fingers catching the edge of the burning paper. Flames licked the back of his hand. The fine hairs instantly curled and blackened, and his skin turned from white to red, then from red to a translucent, ghastly white with tissue fluid seeping beneath it.

He felt no pain. Pinching the edge of the ashes, he fished them out of the fire. Two-thirds of the bill had already burned away, and sparks still glowed on what remained. He slapped at them with his other hand. The embers burned into his palm, sticking the skin to the paper ash.

The fire went out.

He held the thing before his eyes. It was a black mass of curled-edged ash that still retained the rough shape of a bill.

At the slightest touch of his fingers, the blackened part crumbled into powder and sifted down between them.

It fell into the muddy water and floated on the surface like an extremely thin layer of coal dust that the wind might scatter at any moment.

Blisters had already risen on the burned back of his hand, transparent and filled with pale yellow tissue fluid, an unhealthy red ring around their edges.

He did not look at his hand. He stared at the ashes for a long time. Then he wiped his hand on his trouser leg, leaving ash and scraps of burned skin stuck to the fabric.

He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, as though nothing had happened.

The homeless man who was high out of his mind still leaned nearby, that blank smile on his face.

The fire kept burning, broken boards crackling in the flames. He did not remember what he had just burned. He would not remember tomorrow, either. The day after, he might not even remember where he had been today.

That was pretty good.

In this place, memory was a luxury. The more clearly you remembered, the more painfully you lived.

In another direction, in the alley opposite a convenience store.

A man crouched at the foot of a wall.

His shirt cuffs were worn through and his collar frayed, but it was still possible to tell that it had once been a respectable shirt. Ox-

ford cloth, pale blue, with needle holes on the left breast where a brand label had been torn off.

He crouched there, his knees against his chest, his hands in his pockets.

In his right pocket was a steel pipe he had picked up at a construction site, about forty centimeters long. One end had been sawed off, leaving a jagged, rusty edge.

He gripped it, his palm slick with sweat.

Sweat mixed with rust, producing a sour, astringent taste like licking a battery. He stared at the convenience store's door. An automatic glass door, with a printed sign reading "No credit" taped to it, the paper's edges already curling.

He was calculating.

Go in, grab bread, grab water, grab anything I can put in my mouth.

He knew the clerk behind the counter. Last week, when he had still had a respectable job and his credit had not yet collapsed, he had nodded to the clerk every day as he passed.

The clerk had nodded back.

Neither knew the other's name, but they nodded twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening.

He thought that probably counted as knowing each other.

Now he was going to rob this person he knew. The clerk would press the alarm beneath the counter. How long would the police take to arrive?

They wouldn't come.

The police in this area would not respond to a convenience store robbery.

But the clerk had a gun. He had seen the shotgun beneath the register. The last time a homeless man had caused trouble outside, the clerk had set the gun on the counter without saying a word, and the homeless man had left.

So he had to act before the clerk reached that gun. With the pipe. Hit the hand reaching for it. Then take the things and run. If he could not escape, fight for his life.

It was only his life.

His life was worth nothing anyway.

A hundred-dollar bill drifted down and landed in the muddy water by his feet.

He lowered his head and looked at the money.

Franklin's face lay upward, half submerged. Muddy water slowly seeped along the bill's edges, turning the green ink a filthy dark green.

He stared at that face. For a long time. Long enough for the streetlight beside him to flicker three times.

He released the steel pipe in his pocket.

His fingers opened one by one. The pipe slid down, pressing into the side of his thigh.

He bent down and picked the bill out of the muddy water. Water dripped from its edges onto his worn cuffs. He rubbed the mud off Franklin's face with his thumb, but could not get it clean. The stains had worked into the paper's fibers.

He held the bill before his eyes, against the streetlight. The watermark was there. The security thread was there.

Real.

He folded the bill and tucked it into his shirt pocket, against his chest.

Then he stood, his knees cracking. He walked into the convenience store. The automatic door opened, and the door chime gave a short electronic beep.

The clerk behind the counter looked up, the person who nodded to him twice every day.

The man approached the shelves and took a bag of sliced bread and a bottle of water.

The cheapest ones. He went to the register, took the bill from his shirt pocket, and laid it on the counter. Wet and muddy, it clung to the surface, its edges curling slightly. The clerk looked down at the bill, then up at the man's face. He looked for several seconds. Then he opened the register and made change.

Coins and several crumpled one-dollar bills. He pushed the change toward the man along with the bread and water.

Neither spoke. The man picked up his things and left the convenience store. He sat on a concrete bollard at the alley's entrance, tore open the bread bag, and took out a slice. The crust was a little dry. Chewing it felt like chewing a sheet of paper.

He chewed very slowly. Not because he was not hungry, but because he had been hungry so long that his stomach had shrunk to the size of a fist. Eating too fast would make him vomit.

The steel pipe was still in his other pocket.

He did not know when the next bill would drift down. So he kept it.

In the deepest part.

The area where even homeless people would not gather.

There were no sheet-metal shacks here, no nests built from discarded cardboard boxes, only a half-collapsed redbrick wall and a concrete overhang at its base barely large enough to shelter half a body.

Rain dripped from the overhang, soaking a patch of dark green moss at the foot of the wall.

A homeless man lay on the moss, his body already crawling with white maggots. He lay on his side, knees drawn up, arms bent, his head resting on one hand.

Like a baby in its mother's womb.

But the skin on his face was gray, his lips white, his eye sockets deeply sunken like two dried-up wells.

He had several festering wounds on his arms, calves, and the sides of his ribs, where blunt objects had struck him, soles had ground into him, and life itself had worn him away little by little.

The skin curled back around the wounds, exposing dark red flesh beneath, its surface covered by a thin, translucent film of pus.

The smell was noticeable from several meters away, sickly sweet, like overripe fruit left in the sun for three days.

Flies settled on the wound on his calf. He did not wave them away.

Not because he did not want to, but because he had no strength left.

A dog curled beside him.

She was too filthy to tell what color her coat had originally been. Perhaps yellow, perhaps white, perhaps black and white.

Now it was a uniform grayish brown, repeatedly soaked with muddy water, motor oil, and unknown liquids. Her belly was large and hung loosely, her teats swollen, with red rings around them from nursing puppies.

She had just given birth.

Somewhere in a corner, the puppies whined, their voices thin as wind passing over rusty wire. The dog did not turn to look.

She curled beside her owner, her chin resting in his palm.

The old homeless man's fingers moved, a final, unconscious twitch of muscle before death.

His fingertips brushed the dog's ear. She raised her head and licked his fingers. The finger was icy and dusty, its nail packed with mud.

The dog's tongue was warm and pink, coated with a thin sheen of moisture. It was probably the only clean thing in this alley.

The old homeless man's lips moved. His voice was faint, as faint as wind passing through a gap in sheet metal.

"You can eat me."

The dog did not understand. She only licked his fingers.

"Thank you for always staying with me." His voice was as dry as sandpaper scraping glass. "Everyone left. The landlord. The foreman. The one who said we'd do day labor together. The docks. The convenience store guy who nodded to me every day. All gone."

He paused, his Adam's apple moving as though swallowing something. But there was nothing in his throat. "You're still here. Only you didn't abandon me."

The dog rested her chin in his palm. That hand had almost no warmth left, but she did not care.

She rested her chin there, eyes half closed, and slowly swept her tail across the ground once. A small puff of dust rose.

"The world doesn't want me anymore. You still do."

He closed his eyes. His hand slipped from the dog's head and landed on the cold concrete, fingers slightly curled, as though still clutching something.

A hundred-dollar bill floated down and landed on his knee. Green fell on gray, like a leaf drifting in from another world.

A hole in the trousers over his knee exposed a kneecap covered by nothing but skin.

The bill rested on his kneecap, its corners lifting in the wind, gently patting the protruding bone.

He did not open his eyes. He no longer had the strength to pick it up, to buy anything, to spend it.

Money was useless to the dead.

A hand suddenly darted in from beside him and snatched the bill away.

The hand was thin, its nails packed with black dirt, a scabbed knife scar marking the web between thumb and forefinger.

Its owner was a young man in a hoodie, his hood pulled so low that only part of his chin showed, marked by a newly healed scratch.

He clenched the bill and turned to leave.

The dog bared her teeth, as though her tail had been stepped on, as though she had been kicked in the belly, as though all her fear and pain had been compressed into a single hoarse growl.

Her lips curled upward, exposing pink gums and several worn, yellowed fangs. She was very old.

Several teeth were missing. But she bared them.

The owner of that hand turned back, raised his foot, and kicked her in the belly.

Her belly caved inward under the kick. Her body bounced off the ground like a kicked ball, flipped once in midair, and struck the redbrick wall.

Her ribs hit a corner of brick with a dull thud.

She gave a short, sharp cry. Not a cry, but the sound of air being violently squeezed from her lungs.

Then she fell onto her side on the ground, all four legs twitching once.

She got up again. She had lain on the ground for about five breaths before bracing her hind legs against it and pushing herself up bit by bit.

The side of her belly where she had been kicked shook violently. Her ribs rose and fell unnaturally fast, like the heartbeat of a sparrow clenched in someone's palm.

One hind leg was lame. She dared not put it down and could only stand on three legs. But she stood.

Limping on that hind leg, she slowly returned to her owner, step by step. Those few meters took her a long time. She curled up again and rested her chin in the palm that would never move again.

The puppies' whimpers came from the corner. The dog did not turn. She rested her chin there, eyes half closed, and slowly swept her tail across the ground once. The dust it raised settled on her own paws.

Chen Mo crouched on top of the water tower and emptied the last bag of money. A few bills remained inside, four or five hundred US dollars or so.

He pulled them out, folded them, and tucked them into his clothes.

Buzz.

The system sounded again.

Chen Mo's hand stopped in midair.

He crouched on top of the water tower, his hand in his pocket, his fingers pinching those bills, his knuckles white.

Wind swept between the sheet-metal roofs, carrying up the sounds of people fighting over the money below: curses, screams, fabric tearing, fists hitting flesh.

This time, he stayed silent for a long time.

Then Chen Mo twisted his mouth and climbed down the wall.

The person who had grabbed the money and kicked the dog was gone. So was the money.

The dog was still curled up beside its owner. Hearing his footsteps, it lifted its head, a low growl rumbling in its throat. Its lips curled back, exposing its few worn, yellowed fangs.

Its body shook, three legs braced against the ground, the side of its belly that had been kicked still heaving violently. But it did not back away.

Chen Mo crouched down.

Level with the dog.

He did not reach out to pet it, did not say, "It's all right now," did not make any of the gestures humans made when trying to comfort animals. He simply crouched there, pulled three hundred-dollar bills from his pocket, and tucked them straight into the hand that had already gone cold, without even folding them. The bills lay against the fingers, their edges fluttering gently when the wind blew.

As though that hand were still clutching something it refused to let go of.

The dog lowered its head and sniffed the bills. The smell of ink, muddy water, sweat, blood. Then it sniffed its owner's fingers. Finally, it rested its chin back on those three bills. Its tail swept slowly across the ground once. The dust it stirred up settled on Chen Mo's shoes.

Chen Mo stood up.

He turned and climbed back up the wall. Back on top of the water tower, he had only one hundred-dollar bill left in his pocket.

The system finally fell silent, too.

He pulled up his zipper and crouched at the edge of the water tower.

Things he could not see were still happening below.

Wherever the money drifted, some grabbed it, some hid it, some burned it. Some clutched it as they walked into pharmacies; some clutched it as they waited to die. The sounds of fighting rose between the sheet-metal shacks, muffled, like people arguing underwater. Some were crying, some laughing, some cursing, some praying.

Chen Mo listened quietly.

He knew this world would not become better because of these few bags of money.

The old homeless man who had waited to die at the foot of the wall had still died. The dog had still been kicked, and the puppies would still whimper for milk. Once they grew a little bigger, they, too, would be kicked, would curl up beside someone waiting to die, lick that person's fingers, then rest their chins in a palm that would never move again.

The docks would still crush casual laborers' legs. Antibiotics would still be out of reach. Painkillers would still be sold by the bucket: cheap, plentiful, addictive. The streets would always be here, waiting for the next person to fall.

Nothing about the way this city operated would change because a boy in pajamas had scattered a few bags of money.

But tonight, somewhere in Gotham, perhaps someone was clutching a hundred-dollar bill and, for the first time in his life, sleeping without having to think about how he would die tomorrow.

Perhaps it was the man with wet bills in his shirt pocket. Perhaps it was the homeless man with burn blisters on the back of his hand, who had closed his eyes without saying a word. Perhaps it was some woman he had not seen, who had rushed out of a sheet-metal shack, picked up a bill, then run back inside and braced the door firmly shut.

Perhaps it was some child who had hidden the bill beneath their pillow and stayed awake all night, afraid that when they opened their eyes, they would discover the money had been a dream.

Enough.

Chen Mo stood up and stretched his legs, numb from crouching.

His knee clicked.

The gray wind swept past him, carrying the smells of rust, mildew, and that sickly-sweet odor, as though something were quietly rotting.

The hundred-dollar bill in his pocket rested against his chest, faintly hot. He did not look back at the alley.

He turned, climbed down the water tower, and disappeared into the shadows of the shantytown.