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Jay Nakamura wasn’t a pilgrim by nature. Even after his family fled Gamorra before the first bombs fell along the coastal cities, Jay never took the time to look back. He couldn’t afford to, and neither could his mother, not after they’d been kidnapped and tortured during Bendix’s implementation of martial law and his steadfast determination to eliminate all aspects of the former presidential regime.
He’d lost a leg escaping Bendix’s facility, but his mother was tortured into a vegetative state. Since their escape, he worked as an under-the-table accountant at the fish market near his and his mother’s hut in a tiny village in Indonesia. Jay had a knack for languages, so along with Gamorran, English, and Javanese, Jay kept books, translated documents, and wrote out emails and invoices for all the fish market vendors. It earned him just enough to afford medication for both himself and his mother, and fish that didn’t sell by the end of the day. Jay hadn’t tasted meat in years and didn’t suppose he would anytime soon.
So Jay Nakamura wasn’t interested in reliving the good ol’ days, because there weren’t any good ol’ days, not for Gamorran refugees who’d just managed to flee by the skin of their teeth until Bendix’s madness was too much for even the warmongers of the Pacific. Jay didn’t have any powers but he still had his head, and his head told him to keep his mouth shut and his head down. The world was rarely kind to refugees, but even less so to those with permanent disabilities and the elderly who needed to be taken care of. For what it was worth, Jay simply didn’t have time to grieve anyone. He couldn’t look back and reflect because a man needed support for that, and Jay didn’t have any.
But he would make time, just this once. This pilgrimage was to mark a shared inheritance after all.
The old Gamorra didn’t exist anymore. Too much of the land was irradiated, and the water purification systems weren’t strong enough to purify the poisonous water. The few indigenous tribes that had survived the bombings were tucked away in their mountains and forests, and refused to show themselves. Jay didn’t blame them. He’d been a city boy since birth, even though his father had been from a snowy village out in one of those mountains.
But Jay’s father had died when he was seven. His father wasn’t unlucky enough to see his country get reduced to dust ten years after his death, and he wasn’t unlucky enough to watch both his wife and son get repeatedly raped and experimented on by the new political regime. Jay liked to think that the stroke that had taken Ricardo Nakamura’s life came at the right time. He wasn’t born a politician like his wife and Jay’s mother, Sara. Ricardo had been different, the kind of gentle soul Jay didn’t believe existed anymore in their world.
Ricardo had been an accountant with a passion for astronomy. He’d believed in the skies more than he’d understood the wretchedness in people. Maybe that’s why his mother had married him. He was from a lower caste, and only living and working in Gamorra because he’d wanted to give back to the country that had sent him to college abroad and helped foster his passion for numbers and stars. Ricardo Nakamura’s head had always been in the clouds, but he’d never gone up there alone. He’d taken his wife and child with him. Ricardo had, had dreams. He’d taught Jay how to dream too, and Sara had dreamed with them.
But by the time his mother’s political career had been ramping up, Ricardo’s life was tragically cut short. He’d been there one day and gone the next. That’s how Death did its business in their world. Jay hadn’t thought to look up at the sky after he died. He’d committed himself to a life of politics along with his mother, and had even tried his hand at being an honest journalist, but even that ended after the first officers raided their homes. And because there were no dreams to be had after watching his mother’s rape at the hands of a neighborhood watchman, Jay didn’t think about the stars for a very long time.
Not until the Kryptonians came.
Jay didn’t inherit his father’s optimism, but he did inherit his curiosity.
Everyone knew of Superman, but Superman wasn’t for everyone. Jay knew that bit intimately. Superman wasn’t a world politician. He didn’t dictate how a nation conducted its business with its people, and he didn’t get involved in the precise machinations of elections and transfer of power.
Even after he’d died and returned, Jay and his people knew that, that level of protection wasn’t always afforded to the weakest in the world. Superman was for whoever Superman decided to stand for. It was a dilemma of the type you’d discuss among politicians and philosophers, but the reality was that Superman could only save people, but he couldn’t save the world, and he couldn’t help someone who didn’t want to be helped.
So when the Kryptonians came, Jay had known before anyone else that they wouldn’t help people as selflessly as Superman did. He knew they wouldn’t go out of their way to help get rid of the radiation that had poisoned Gamorra’s waters, that they wouldn’t hunt down the rest of Bendix’s secret supporters who’d watched from their televisions as bombs planted in factories and facilities across Gamorra all detonated at the same time, leaving the country’s coastline a desert of ashes. He’d known and he’d been right. No Kryptonian had come to the Pacific to help the remaining Gamorrans.
It was the nature of these things. No one cared when the Gamorrans died, so it didn’t surprise Jay one bit when Lois Lane reported that her father, the deceased General Samuel Lane, had been the one to enact the genocide against New Krypton. Lois Lane, Superman’s number one supporter, friend of truth, justice, and the American way – her father had destroyed what was left of Superman’s homeland.
And although Jay Nakamura had no love for superheroes or Superman, he understood what it felt like to watch one’s homeland disappear forever and leave behind nothing but poison that would kill for generations to come. That was the only inheritance survivors of Gamorra received from their nation. The poison was in their mind as much as it was in the water.
A year ago was also when the radios reported that General Zod of New Krypton had helped to slaughter thousands of humans in retaliation for New Krypton’s demise. Jay had been tending to his mother at the time. He remembered the memory distinctly because Sara had soiled her pants, so Jay had been bathing her in the outhouse when the radio warned citizens to shelter in place.
It was fascinating for him because the remnants of Krypton hadn’t invaded the little fishing village he and his mother were tucked away in since the death of Gamorra. Soldiers with a mission never thought about the bare bones of a society, unless it was to pillage and plunder, but Zod’s men hadn’t pillaged and plundered. They’d killed leaders of so-called free nations. They’d destabilized governments quicker than any CIA operation in noted history. They’d beheaded and burned men to death, but most of the deceased were reportedly military personnel of the various governments of the world.
And some were superheroes, but Jay cared for them the least.
Death was a part of war. Absolute annihilation was the fate for anyone who wouldn’t submit. Gamorra hadn’t submitted to its new king, and so, it’d paid the price. Deep down, Jay knew that Zod knew that humanity would rather perish than submit to an overlord, so more violence was inevitable.
It was the prophecy of the damned. If someone could, they would annihilate another for the sake of resources, power, or just the vague notion of survival of the fittest. There was no room for nuance. Neither General Samuel Lane nor General Zod had believed in such either.
Jay Nakamura wasn’t a pilgrim by nature, but just this one time, he couldn’t argue that there was a kinship here. It was the first anniversary of the New Kryptonian Genocide. Whereas the world liked to call it World Peace Day to commemorate the lives of those who’d perished at the hands of General Zod and the remnants of his army, Jay Nakamura planned to remember the ones who’d died at the hands of General Sam Lane. After all, his little fishing village wasn’t throwing any parties or parades for any of the fallen. They had no reason so. No one on their small island had died by Zod’s hands.
They wouldn’t care that Jay was embarking on a pilgrimage for inheritors of a fate that existed only because suffering seemed to be innate in every culture and society peppered throughout the cosmos. Jay understood nuance, even if others did not. He knew that even if no one else was remembering the other planet that had chosen to orbit their sun, Jay Nakamura was.
And Superman was too.
They were brothers who’d inherited the same fate, even if they’d never met once.
Jay knew that if his father was still alive, he’d have clamored at the opportunity to speak to the people from the stars. His father had loved Superman even though Superman had never helped Gamorra. His father had much love in his heart.
But his father was dead.
Because who wanted to fight every minute of the day? Who wanted to watch others fight every minute of existence when there was food to put on the table, and medicine to get from reputable sellers? It got exhausting after a while, and Jay was already broken.
That’s why the power brokers of Gamorra had turned away when Gamorra needed them the most. Who wanted to fight when annihilation was easier? So, it hadn’t exactly shocked Jay when he learned that General Sam Lane did exactly what Bendix had. He’d annihilated all of New Krypton, where women, children, and non-combatants were sleeping, while their military might managed to survive by virtue of flying towards Earth at the right time.
And everyone knew that Kal El’s home planet had already perished once. Maybe he thought it wouldn’t happen again, but that was the difference between Superman and Jay Nakamura. Superman had hope. Jay Nakamura did not. The US government annihilating a surviving population of a previous genocide wasn’t exactly surprising considering the reports that had come out after Zod had been taken down again.
But maybe Superman had thought things would go differently. Maybe he’d assumed that they’d find a way to live in harmony, instead. But Superman didn’t know.
Maybe that’s why Jay thought the pilgrimage was necessary, because to him, Superman was still the lost child yearning for home, and not him.
There was a book Jay had once read that said that despite all of humanity’s attempts to eradicate the bugs, they never truly went away.¹
Neither had the Gamorrans, as Jay was proof, and neither had the Kryptonians. Superman had survived a second ethnic cleansing, even if he was a baby during the first one. It was the space in between the bombs and the blasts. It was the will to survive coupled with the right timing. Homelands were burned and people were killed, but you couldn’t kill everything.
They couldn’t kill Jay. His mother, though immobile and non-verbal, had also managed to survive. Superman, Supergirl, and Superboy had all survived. General Zod had survived, even if General Lane had taken his own life. The mountain folk of Gamorra lived quietly and out of sight, so Jay knew they’d survived as well. Scores of Gamorrans had fled Gamorra even before Bendix closed outward migration from Gamorra.
And Jay still spoke Gamorran in his hut when talking to his mother, so the language would continue to survive through him, if no one else.
New Krypton was gone, but Kryptonians weren’t. Jay had heard of the right-wing conspiracy theories that claimed there were Kryptonians who’d survived General Lane’s bomb and were now plotting to take out the Milky Way while colonizing faraway galaxies.
You could kill the whole country, but you couldn’t kill its spirit. You could also slander an entire race, but that didn’t mean those who knew the truth weren’t listening.
Jay was listening. He had no doubt Superman was too.
And so, by some wretchedly cosmic design, Jay Nakamura and Superman had something in common, something Jay Nakamura had made time to reflect on, and was embarking on a pilgrimage for.
Maybe they’d always had it in common.
Jay wasn’t much of a pilgrim. He wasn’t much of a traveler either. There weren’t many things to travel to these days, and sites of religious pilgrimage were for the privileged. His homeland was an irradiated landmass so thoroughly broken that even coming outside of the protective cocoons of mountains and jungles away from the blast sites was a major hazard. Those who’d managed to survive deserved their peace. Jay wouldn’t return any time soon, if ever.
But Jay walked to the little clearing at the edge of a low cliff anyway. It was like any other cliff in Java. Sometimes people used it as a swimming dive, but most of the time, it was just another rocky outcropping that watched over the Indian Ocean.
But it was where Jay wanted to say a prayer and leave some offerings for those who’d perished on New Krypton.
So fine, maybe there weren’t enough people who cared about when others were swiftly killed because of a problem that didn’t exist, but some still did. And Jay’s heart was still bleak. It hurt to think that an entire species could cease to exist because another willed it.
And Jay wasn’t a pilgrim. He was just another refugee who’d managed to find a place to live in that wasn’t really home but better than an irradiated grave in the Pacific. The Kryptonians had been blown up in space, so their ashes now floated with the ashes of their predecessors who hadn’t been able to survive the first of Brainiac’s soldiers. Jay had heard bodies were floating in space too, since the red sun had rendered them powerless for a brief period of time. There wasn’t anything poetic about either situation. Death was death, and the Kryptonians were unfortunate enough to experience mass death over and over again.
Jay didn’t know how Superman could do it. Jay had barely managed to survive his first, and now he was about as useless as broken eggshells.
So for him, it wasn’t the desire to become a pilgrim that led him to walk to the cliff and light incense for the dead, but the notion of understanding instead. He understood the fate of those who’d survived being forcibly martyred. The loneliness would remain, and the pain was perpetual. They were brothers even though they’d never met, and they’d be brothers even after they both died.
He said his prayers out loud before sitting in silence as the sun dipped. Then he laid out a portion of the food he’d cooked earlier and gave thanks to his gods for whatever he had left.
Because even if the prophecy of the damned dictated that suffering was eternal, their loneliness wasn’t. There would be an end to that, eventually. Those after them would build the families and homes they couldn’t now. They’d go onto speak variations of the languages that had died with the bombs. He hoped Superman understood that. He also hoped that he knew to keep trying and moving forward, because the bugs were still here.
So was Superman, so was Jay.