Like the other teenagers at his high school, Rakim took an interest in video games. While the lower middle class meant his range of access could be somewhat limited, it became something he’d spent spare money on as soon as he had it, at least, for a while. With time he found ways around some of these barriers to his access to those games at times. He had genuine fun playing them when he did. They were games – that was what they were for. Through them, he sometimes even found common ground with some of the other kids. It was only after hearing some of the teenagers who had bullied him in the past talk about those games that he realized something about so many of the games he’d grown up enjoying.
Castlevania. Metroid. Mega Man. Mario. Zelda. Final Fantasy. Doom. D&D. Spelunky.
All the games he played wanted him to kill bats.
At first each individual instance of it had seemed harmless to him. Games weren’t real. They were things that people played for fun. Within game worlds, every being takes on a different, specific role for the purposes of the game. You had to be able to have a space to play with concepts like that. After all, no board game was really making a statement about how hungry hippos really were, was it? That seemed a bit farfetched. Just because a person would kill a bat in a game, one that would come back to life instantly when the game would be reset anyway, didn’t mean that they’d kill a bat like him in real life. It was just a game.
But when he started hearing some of his tormentors talking about ‘goddamn bats’ around him, in ways that were designed for him to hear, talking about everything they wished they could’ve done to vent their frustrations on the bats in these games at great length, he began to ask himself some questions. None of them had tried to kill him as such yet, that much was true, but they did tell him he should go off to fly into a building. In spite of this, he wouldn’t have wanted to have had to give up the connections that he’d managed to make with people through some of these same games, or the sense of respite that he’d gotten from playing them alone at times. Yet he couldn’t help but ask himself if, on some level, for those who had been taught to fear bats, these games seemed to confirm what they’d been taught to believe. What if they did?
Rakim began to look for positive representations of bats in the media and found vanishingly few. His fellow students thought him a blood drinker, even though vampires were a very small percentage of all bats, but few people had the patience to sit down and learn about the differences between all the different species of bats. Wingnut was a joke. Gargoyles weren’t quite bats, even though he sometimes tried to tell himself it was close enough. Batman was human, but at least he was using bat-related power for good, he tried to tell himself. Their situations were reversed. Rakim was poor, but his mother was alive. He thought himself luckier.
Rakim didn’t need a bat signal. The crescent moon already lit up the sky.
In other ways, Rakim wished the moon had been kinder to him. High school wreaked havoc on his body. He hated having had to start binding, but the blood was especially intolerable. He trained harder and harder, almost as if to get revenge against his body. He was told that it was just nature’s way. He remembered the first time he’d been called unnatural. He’d run off to hide into a forest clearing, looking up at a butterfly landing on a branch in the light, and asked himself, what is it that separates me from this? How am I not like this? In a way, the forest was a refuge from the city kids who bullied him, yet in another way, nature was also deaf to his plight.
There was always sound.
When he would be home, sometimes, before or after a day at school – daytime school could prove challenging to stay awake for, for the nocturnal – his mother would put on music from their homeland for them to listen to together, the sound permeating the space between them, almost as if closing the distance between them by how it filled the air. Hearing it, he felt almost as though he could imagine growing up in his homeland, if it had been at peace. She told him it was music that her Sufi dervish trainer used to play to her as they trained, that the ecstatic trance that dancing to it brought was the effect of the voice of God speaking to them through it.
He found such beauty in this sound! He wondered why he didn’t hear more of it elsewhere. Did their sound evoke fear as well? He asked his mother about it. “It may surprise you to learn this, Rakim, but there have been those among us, just as there have been known to have been here before, who believe that music is the devil.” He was shocked to learn such a thing. How could anyone believe that there could be evil in such perfect beauty?
The subjects of beauty and evil came to figure more prominently in his mind as his teenage years marched on. When he began to contemplate whether or not he would like to ask out any of his classmates, he realized that those of them that seemed to him like he’d have wanted to ask were guys, just as he was. What would his mother think, he wondered? Certainly, he couldn’t infer too much from the fact that she didn’t find music’s beauty evil itself. He tried to find a way to get her opinion about it other than admitting it to her directly to test the waters.
While she saw through his attempts, she decided to let him believe that he was being more subtle than he was. “Judging people is God’s job, my son. My job is to raise you.” Still, he worried about betraying the homeland he remembered so little about somehow, sacrificed to his convenience. “Our homeland has a long history, Rakim. There have been times we’ve taken far different things for granted than we do now, without needing to have been told by anyone.” Hard traditionalists would have thought him a girl anyway. How could they tell him not to date guys? Bats were meant to sleep upside-down. What could be unnatural about being ‘inverted’ so?
After the bullying he’d endured for being a bat, for not being a ‘real’ guy, and for his mother’s clothes, his newfound attraction became a new catalyst for a fresh batch of bullies to decide to start to pick on him again. Remembering his mother’s words, he strove to defend himself without causing serious damage to them as diligently as he could, employing his growing skill to neutralize them with acrobatic dodges, throws and locks, but the more they came at him, the more difficult it became. Finally he used his bat hearing to gather dirt on all of them from afar and blackmailed them all into leaving him alone lest their reputations be destroyed.
This time he’d done what she’d asked. He’d listened to them. He’d won by listening.
“Today,” his mother started at their training one day, “I’m going to teach you something different.” He looked up at her questioningly. “It’s another way to defend yourself.” Was there some aspect of his training that he’d been neglecting? “It’s also a lot more than that.” This, he could believe. But, what could it have been? “It’s your birthright as a bat. Some of us no longer learn these days. There’s some stigma attached to it. But it’s natural, and it’s beauty itself, Rakim.” His heartbeat increased, waiting.
“I’m going to teach you how to fly.”
For as long as he would live, Rakim would never be able to describe the sensation of flying to someone who couldn’t fly themselves to his satisfaction. It was the most exhilarating feeling in the world. It was as though the world were opened up to him. Somehow the sensation of flight made him believe that all beings had to have been destined for complete, absolute freedom someday. He wondered why it had taken her this long to have taught him how to do it, why he hadn’t seen more of his people flying to and from various places throughout their day. Why would have there been any stigma attached to such a harmless thing as flying?
“You have to understand that, for people who can’t fly, our nature can become a subject of fear and envy. It can make the world smaller for us. We can escape from dangerous situations, like a mugging, by flying away. Some of them style us as cowards, or are afraid we’ll drop things on them from above. Just think of if you fell out of a plane or out of a building. You could still be alive despite it, but someone who can’t fly couldn’t be. It’s hard for them to accept that. Some of us... some of us have our wings clipped, to be seen as equal. Too often, they can never accept that they can’t fly anymore. If you get surgery for that other reason someday, I hope you keep your wings. They’re different. There’s no shame in being able to fly, you know?”
He stopped, and thought about what she’d said for a moment. “... I wish everyone could fly, mother.” She smiled at him.
“You’re a good kid, Rakim.”
