The MatchmanSometimes it was difficult for him to tell where the metal armor on his arms ended and the flesh of his arms actually began. Tonight was most definitely one of those times. He slouched back in his elaborate command swivel chair, punching idly through a thousand uninformative channels of nothing on his titanic state-of-the-art viewscreen that covered most of the wall before him, and tried not to think too much about any one thing in particular. His colossal underground bunker, high-tech décor and all, loomed in silence all around him, hundreds of feet below the less-than-salubrious surface of swamps and rusting shipping containers that was, is, and always will be northern New Jersey. Doctor Dejection was, to put it mildly, in a blue funk.
He was uncharacteristically alone this evening. He mused gloomily over the several reasons for this. His incompetent minions were scattered to the far corners of the metro New York area. First off the bat, Super Ficial\! had managed to get himself sent back to the insane asylum upstate after barely twenty-four hours rampaging on the loose. His good twin brother Matchman had summarily beaten him into submission with an incredibly tacky piece of heavy, blunt modern art from the United Nations Building’s Sculpture Garden, thereby undoing the planning of months that it had taken to spring him free from the asylum in the first place. Doctor Dejection had been ready to hit the roof when the news of that particular fiasco came in. He had almost punched a hole in the wall of his beloved bunker - in direct contravention of his essential nature as a man of thought, not a man of action.
And then there was El Burro Bandito. Against his best instincts, and probably, when one got right down to it, only to placate that gleaming golden vixen Discordia, he had taken that flea-bitten excuse for a hobby horse into the ranks of the B.L.A.H. Corporation’s ever-growing army of operatives, only to see him completely and utterly bungle a simple jewel heist his very first day on the job. The scruffy ne’er-do-well had last been reported hiding out up at a relative’s hole-in-the-wall apartment in Spanish Harlem. Doctor Dejection sighed as he wondered aloud whether a tactical nuclear strike on the area just north of the easternmost third of 110th Street would constitute a species of urban renewal. He somehow doubted whether the Mayor and his cronies down at City Hall would see it in quite that light.
This train of thought led inexorably to Discordia herself. Again, for such a crucial operative, it was highly disturbing to him that he had not the slightest clue as to her whereabouts. Sometimes he worried whether or not that odd little golden apple of hers might not have some inherent ability to confound his sensor network, the one that relayed images to his giant viewscreen twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. She was far too fiendish and clever by half, and her ambition was of a caliber that reminded him of himself when he had been her age. Of course, it isn’t her, he reminded himself. It’s that cursed golden apple. I’m not fighting her intrigues - I’m fighting the intrigues of a piece of supernatural fruit. I’m going toe-to-toe in a battle of wits and wills with a plant. And sometimes I wonder who’s winning. How infinitely depressing. He sighed again.
Doctor Dejection was in the rarefied condition of being the smartest person in the concentric world of Matchman and those that he fought both with and against. Lately his tremendous powers of both knowledge and intuition had been leading him to some very strange conclusions, especially on nights like this one when failure seeped from the walls of his command bunker and everything was softly quiet with the dampened silence of defeat. Conclusions that had begun to disturb him, even in the daytime. Conclusions like the one that seemed to dictate that he, that everyone around him, and that everything that he knew of as being real was in fact the rankest fiction - and not very elaborate or skillful fiction at that.
Doctor Dejection had read a great deal of entertaining fiction as a child: science fiction, fantasy fiction, adventure fiction, comic books, the works. He had paid special attention to the oft-ignored inner character of the many, many villains of those popular epics that he had read. He had noticed certain personality traits, certain characteristics of both speech and action that never failed to indelibly mark these villains as being precisely that: villains, with a capital “V.” His heart had gone out to the poor “bad guys.” In the end, they always lost - even though they seemed to have all of the power and resources, and got to wear the coolest outfits. When he was small, he had wanted to grow up to be a villain. True to his desire, when he had become a man he had set out to achieve this dream with alacrity, force and utter lack of scruple that would have made Genghis Khan blush with shame.
It was only when he had already been an acknowledged criminal mastermind for several years that he had gone back and studied those works of prose that had influenced his childhood with a fine-toothed comb. After this intensive study he had come away both depressed and at the same time strangely uplifted - and for exactly the same reason. As an adult, successful in his chosen profession and role, he had finally understood the inner meaning of such ostensibly meaningless pieces of disposable storytelling.
He had seen that, while the villain never won, he could never lose, either, because such a complete and ultimate loss meant the end of whatever world he was unwittingly sustaining by his evil acts. The hero and the villain acted as the separate cylinders of a great two-cycle engine, and between the two piston arms of this engine, they generated an entire existence. If either one of them were to resign, or quit, or switch sides, or die, or be definitively defeated, one arm would fail, the machine would grind to a halt, and the world as they knew it would simply come to an abrupt halt. The one and the zero, the black and the white, the night and the day, the yin and the yang. Both were necessary - and in the end both were the same thing. Or, at least, two parts of the same thing. Fundamentally identical.
But this generation seemed to work only in fictional environments. It was the prevalence of fictional characteristics in his own ostensibly real environment that had come to cause him to wonder as to its reality. On the plus side, if he and everything that he knew were fake, then he was effectively immortal and, while not assured of success, he would at least never fail, both of which observations were rather heartening, when one thought of their implications. On the minus side, if he and everything that he knew were fake - well, then he and everything he knew were fake. That was a pretty big minus right there, all things considered.
Being the smartest individual around, Doctor Dejection was the only person that he knew that thought about such abstruse theories of existence. After all, he could hardly discuss them with the company that he’d been forced to keep recently.
He continued to cycle morosely through the various channels of surveillance available on his king-size viewscreen. He wished for something, anything, to derail his current train of thought.
Sometimes, and this was definitely one of those times, he wished he wasn’t so lonely.