In the beginning there was the word, and the word - and the word -
The joker who is stabbed through the heart, who lives, who will not die, knows nothing. It is all new to him. He arrives in Gotham fresh and strange and expectant, dreaming of big scores and fantastic mayhem. Who is this fool, he thinks, who says that he is a match for me?
They are fighting on a roof. This joker falls, but does not die. If he had died there, that would have been the end of it. The first to match wits and fall short, but not the last, and not even the most remarkable. It's only that he doesn't die. By the end of it, he does know one thing: if you can conquer that first and final death, you have conquered them all.
.
The joker who hears the first faint buzz of the television set is like the dark secret that lies dead and dreaming beneath the surface of the sea. He has been asleep for so long, and yet, this is his first moment of life. In the beginning, there was the Word. It comes through the speakers, and little by little the world begins to unfurl around him, out from the television that hangs overhead—the green walls, the cracked ceiling, the ancient carpeted floors, the listless heads of patients all around him. That one word he recognizes. That one word is the frame that a world begins to assemble itself around, the familiar thing in an unfamiliar life, in an unfamiliar head. It draws him up through the depths. It breaks the surface, like a hand reaching down to him, to save him-
(does he remember a hand reaching down to him, through the acid smoke, through the red darkness?)
"Batman," he says, "darling."
.
The joker who hefts the crowbar knows that death doesn't matter. It's funny. And isn't he the funny one-? Or is that one of the others?
.
The joker who shoots Barbara Gordon looks back behind himself and he sees his reflection repeated onward into the green abyss. He is a man caught between mirrors. The infinite lives he has lived. The infinite lives still before him. Was he married, was he orphaned? Was he a criminal or a victim, a stranger or a native son? Here is the one always solid thing: the shape against the sky, the flapping edges, the shock of pain in the shape of knuckles. The Batman is always the Batman, no matter how many times he is multiplied into the abyss. Joker understands this innately.
He understands the cruel joke, the punchline of which he cannot articulate: they are doomed or blessed to hold this pattern.
They cannot die. They never end.
He thought that the Batman's familiarity shows they have something in common, that perhaps Batman understands the cruel punchline too. In the rain, in the darkness, in the dying light of the funfair, he discovers he was wrong.
I can't walk this beam to you, he is trying to tell the Batman. I don't believe that it can hold.
But the Batman is still shining the beam across the darkness, hopeless or not. For a moment, Joker can almost cup the light in his hands. That he would try means nothing, and it means everything. Over an infinity of life times, that moment—the rain, the laughter, the howling sirens—is the first time that Joker falls in love.
.
The joker who welcomes Batman to the asylum understands what the first joker did not. Who is this fool, who thinks he is a match for me? The inmates run the asylum, and the psychiatrists try to explain it. The whole thing is so sad it makes you want to laugh.
We are all just extensions of you, he tries to tell the Bat. We are here because you need us to be. Love us. Embrace us.
This joker is patient. Their time is coming. Maybe not today, but soon.
.
The joker who kills Rachel remembers when all of this was already done.
"All the old familiar places," he says, to himself-–to the batman who is fragile and weak and new and doesn't know what he knows. Who never seems to know what he always knows.
This joker remembers many things. Oh, very few of them are "true" in the classical sense, in the sense that this body went through those particular motions. He couldn't possibly have. It's entirely semantic and, honestly, irrelevant. Joker remembers Arkham. That's where they'll send him if he survives this night. Oh, he knows Arkham. He remembers.
You break yourself down, you reinvent yourself every day, or maybe you don't because the you that reinvents himself wakes up somewhere else, simultaneous and different. What does it matter which is which?
At the top of this unfinished building, windswept by the howl of the evening sky, the Bat has found him. The dogs are new. Nothing else is. This feeling is like, he imagines, the warmth of returning to a lover after a long journey, this satisfaction. He knows it. He has met this batman face to face exactly twice, but the feeling of it follows grooves weathered into his soul before it was even formed. It's ancient. It's endlessly deep, a chasm scarred across the sea floor. It consumes him–-there's a kind of poison in it.
He is holding a crowbar. It is a crowbar that looks like a lead pipe, but it isn't. A pipe, that is. Sure, it's got the heft and the shape and the swing of a lead pipe, but that's entirely semantic and, honestly, irrelevant. Anyone who knows anything could tell you this is really a crowbar. Not that anyone does. Know anything, that is. Rage is frothing up inside him, rising and crashing, directing the swing of his arm. What is he angry about? Little boys with their cute little uniforms, their borrowed shallow confidence: pesky little moons blocking the gracious flow of sunlight. The pipe-that-is-a-crowbar remembers this. The swing of his arm remembers. Of course there are no boys in uniforms here, but moons-–oh yes, pesky little moons, blocking his light from shining down. Girlfriends and commissioners and other budding wanna-be heroes. Those he is familiar enough with.
He bears down on Batman, bashing and breaking whatever his swing can reach. He doesn't want to kill him of course. Of course. But pain, the desire for pain, for this particular sweet strain of it, overwhelms him. It echoes in him. Come on come on come on. Look, the Joker is very easy to understand. All those psychiatrists that he hasn't met yet, they overlook the obvious every time. They always get it wrong. The Batman, following their lead, always gets it wrong too.
The Joker who is next
will enlighten him. This Joker will show him
the light. This Joker is the sun and Bats is the earth, and Joker will irradiate his flesh in a burst of light as devastating as it is gorgeous, poison the parasites that infest him, make him whole and young and clean. A perfectly scorched earth. A burning planet suspended, lovely, in the vast nothing of space.
"Oh Batman," he will say, someday, somewhere else, as the gutters run out into the abyss beneath them, "why can't you love me and fear me? As I love and fear you?"
- Detective Comics, Batman #1 (1940)
- The Dark Knight Returns (1986)
- A Death in the Family #426-429 (1988)
- The Killing Joke (1988)
- Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989)
- The Dark Knight (2008)
- Endgame/Death of the Family (2014)