▸ Column · Modern syndicate-era Gotham, gothic noir — adapted from a stalled-car letter into a flooded Gotham intersection
THE PENGUIN replies.
Replied to by The Penguin, with a rebuttal from Batman.
The letter
My motorcar gave out in the left-turn lane of a flooded Gotham intersection during a downpour last week. Before I'd even gathered my wits, a man in a paint-spattered work coat climbed out of his truck, shoved my little hatchback to a dry lot with his bare hands, and drove off into the rain before I could so much as ask his name. I can't stop thinking about him. He had somewhere to be. He got drenched. He behaved as though it were nothing. I want to return the gesture, but the small things I've tried since — holding a door, paying for the coffee behind me — feel laughably undersized next to what he did. Is there a way to repay a stranger's kindness "at scale," or am I overthinking it and ought to simply let the goodness ripple outward as it will?
The Penguin replies
My dear stalled motorist, let us dispense with the fairy tale at once. Holding doors? Buying coffee for the wretch behind you in line? These are the gestures of a serf scattering crumbs, and they have all the strategic weight of a wet feather. Waugh-waugh! You are not "paying forward." You are flailing.
Understand what truly transpired in that downpour. A stranger placed a marker upon you — an unpaid debt — and then vanished into the rain like a man who knows precisely how leverage works. Perhaps he is a simpleton who gives away free labor. Perhaps he is shrewder than you and now holds your gratitude like a man holding an umbrella over your head: useful, until he tilts it.
A gentleman never carries an open debt to a stranger. So find him. And repay not in equal measure — in excess. A favor so lavish it tips the ledger the other way and leaves him owing you. That, my naive friend, is how a fellow who waddles built an empire from a city of fools. The ripple is for sentimentalists. I keep a ledger. So should you.
— The Penguin
Batman weighs in
Cobblepot reads a kindness and sees a debt. He would. He's never received one without a wire underneath it.
That man in the work coat. I know him. Gotham is full of him. He pushed your car because the city only stands on people who do that and never write it down. The moment you turn it into a ledger, Oswald wins — another favor with a hook in it.
Don't find him. Don't tip his scale. Pass it on in the dark, to someone who can't repay you. That's the only repayment that holds.
My parents taught me that before this city took them.
— Batman
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