The Joker: the Meaning of Life
Prologue:
"Hello, hello, hello?"
The villain whose name was Jack Napier called out, using a taunting, sing-song voice to aggravate his foe.
Jack Napier was a gangster. Jack Napier was a murderer.
But most important of all, Jack Napier was insane.
Over the period of his life, accounting to about four decades if he remembered correctly, the ugly persona of his inner self, his persona of murder and death and hate, had slowly appeared, and then grown, and grown, and grown… until finally it consumed him.
Then he became another being entirely. He then was no longer a man, but now a monster. The man known as Jack Napier was dead. He was now the monster… the monster known as the Joker.
The Joker looked out from his post of the fifth floor of the construction site, and looked at the sky, which the pale moon filled.
Joker laughed to himself. The moon was so much like him. All it needed was green hair and red lip stick and a homicidal grin… they would look identical.
The sound of rain pounded on the top of the construction site, and through the cracks the Joker felt the sensation of cold rain running down his face. After a while, the occasional sound of thunder cracked the silent city of Gotham. Then Joker looked away from the moon, and looked with an irritable expression around.
"Come on, Bats," He yelled into the night, his face turning from a perpetual grin into a frown. "I know you're out there!"
There was no reply.
In a fit of anger, Joker roared, and threw the remote control that he had in his hands into a nearby wall.
"Come on already, I've been waiting for over an hour!" Joker shouted.
This was starting to look like all his planning was for nothing, Joker thought, rubbing the back of his neck while trying to think of what to do. Bats had never let him down before. Actually, Bats had always showed up when he didn't want him. Now, when Joker had actually spent all of this time getting ready for a splendid fight, Bats decided now was the time to take a leave of absence.
Joker
sighed. Why did this always happen to him?
There had to be something he could do to bring the Dork Knight
out in the open, Joker thought, his face screwed up in concentration.
Then his face brightened at a thought. Maybe if he shot someone with
one of his traditional BANG guns... no, that would be too much of a
warning; that would show Bats that it was a trap… maybe if he
threatened to blow up the president with a exploding toilet… no, he
already did that… hmmm… well, what about... nah, that's too
"old school"… isn't there anything
that
he could do and get credit for originality? Every kind of good murder
and crime had already been done, and mostly by himself… well, yeah,
there was always that rip-off Scarecrow, who was just taking all
of
the good clichés…
After thinking for about five minutes, Joker felt himself getting extremely aggravated.
He tapped his foot impatiently, and then started fingering his extravagant trap. He had put it in the corner, where it could not be seen due to a partly-completed wall.
Had it all been for nothing?
Then, with utter glee, Joker heard the very small noise of a certain cape flutter in the wind. Without even turning around, Joker giggled.
"Finally!" He said, and then turned around slowly. "Do you know how long I've been waiting?"
On the far side of the fifth floor, the shadow figure dropped from the ceiling. The figure was dressed in black, with a black, filmy cape that flowed from the man's back. The figure also had two horns that protruded from the top of his mask; with the only signs of color on the costume was the bottom of the mask, which showed the bottom of the man under the mask's face, and the yellow bat symbol that shone on the figure's chest. But it was not the fact that the figure was dressed in black that projected fear on all those that saw him. It was the fact that the figure was dressed as a bat.
The figure was known as the Gotham's dark knight, the Batman.
"What do you want, Joker?" the Batman demanded, taking a step forwards towards the serial killer.
"Oh, the usual…" Joker replied, the everlasting grin back on his face, "my face on the dollar bill, write an award-winning book, rule the world, be a hero in my own comic book… shall I go on?"
"I have no time for games," Batman said, as he took one last step until he was a half a foot from Joker, "so if you have nothing special to say, I will be obliged to take you in to the authorities."
"Oh, don't be such a party-pooper!" Joker said, and then pulled out a BANG gun. But when Batman went into a defense position, Joker threw the gun over the ledge in boredom.
"What?" Joker asked, following Batman's glance, and then laughed. "What, you thought I was going to use that pathetic gun on you?" Joker's eyes narrowed into two small slits. "If that was the way I wanted to kill you, you would have been killed years ago."
"Don't bet on it." Batman replied. "I could never be killed as easily as you apparently believe."
"Who said I thought that it was easy?" Joker asked.
Both men looked at each other, each looking straight into each others eyes, into each other's souls, trying to find out what the other was thinking.
"As I asked before, clown, what do you want?" Batman finally said.
"I want you, Bats," Joker replied, and a nasty smile appearing on his face, "I want you to die the most painful, agonizing, and horrific death that anyone has ever seen."
Then Joker started to run.
He ran across the room, and to his satisfaction heard the sound of the Bat running after him. Everything was working so perfectly…
As long as everything worked for the next ten seconds, he would finally have his foe at his mercy.
The Joker slid on the ground, under a large wood piece that was being held by a small crane, and then turned quickly to his left.
Then he heard the sound that he had waited all night to hear.
The Batman's surprised grunt.
Joker then turned around, and saw that his plan had worked exactly as planned. The Batman was now being held, at least at the moment, in a large net, one made of a substance that he could not just break out of with one of his simple batarangs.
The net was made of a special kind of metal, one that could bend like an ordinary string net, and it had cost the Joker over a quarter of a million dollars to get. Hooked to the left side of the net was a large cable that was attached to the side of a huge machine, with dozens of buttons and gadgets all over it.
"Eureka!" Joker exclaimed, "It worked!" Then he giggled. "Do you have any idea how long it has taken me to say that about a trap I made to capture you?"
Batman didn't say anything, but looked at Joker impassively.
"I bet that you are just dying to know how this trap works," Joker said, "and if you aren't already, you soon will be."
He gestured towards the net. "This is a very special net," he said, "one that is very expensive. It is made of a flexible metal that I bought off of the Mad Hatter, the creator of the substance. But that's not the only thing that makes this stuff great."
Then Joker gestured to the cable attached to the net to the machine. "The other great thing about this net is that it can be electrified with an electrical jumper."
Then he smirked at Batman. "But I am sure that at this point you are thinking, 'but bad, old Joker doesn't know that my suit will absorb most of the electrical charge, and I can play possum long enough for me to escape'." Joker wagged a finger at Batman. "Well, I'm sorry to say that that trick won't work this time."
Finally, he gestured to the machine. "I am sure that even your precious suit can't take over fifty thousand volts of electricity. And that is not even with the highest setting. After I have experimented with all the settings, I am sure that you will be no more then a greasy smear on the floor."
After he finished, he looked at Batman, and expecting some sort of reaction; anger, frustration, fear, arrogance, something.
But instead, all that came from Batman was his cold gaze.
"Well…?" Joker asked, "Don't you have anything to say about me genius?"
Still Batman was silent.
"Answer me, damn you!" Joker snarled, throwing the gun he had in his hands at Batman.
This was not going anything like Joker had first thought. He had believed that if he got the caped crusader in a situation that there was no "back-door" or any kind of "secret way out" that, at long last, the Batman would beg for his release. And after a long period of begging, the Joker would give the Batman his wish… and throw him over the side of the construction site, and watch as his foe made a big blood mark on the street sidewalk far below.
The gun hit the net with a clang, and then fell to the ground. Even that didn't get any response from the Dark Knight.
"You can't do this to me!" Joker roared, and then ran over to the machine. "Not in my ultimate moment of triumph!"
Then Joker thought of something. "I don't need any confirmation from you, you know," he said, trying out a bluff. "All I need to do is push this button, and all the years of fighting between us will finally be over."
When all he heard was silence, he moved his hand towards the button.
The one button that would seal Batman's doom forever…
"You would never do it."
Joker moved his hand from the button, and looked at Batman.
"What?"
"You would never do it."
Joker actually thought that he might have heard wrong the first time. But he didn't. What did Batman mean by that?
"What do you mean?" Joker asked, voicing his inner thoughts.
"You would never just kill me, without the satisfaction of breaking me first." Then, for the first time, Joker saw the Batman smile. "If you can read my mind so easily, don't be so surprised that I can read yours."
Joker put his hand on the button angrily. "I don't need to break you to defeat you," he said, "All I need to do is kill you."
"No…" Batman said. "You would never settle for anything less then my utter destruction, both mentally and physically."
"You don't know what you are talking about."
"Your shaking hand says differently." Batman observed.
Joker looked down, and was astonished to see that, indeed, of his hand was shaking.
"You know what I am talking about." Batman continued, as a flash of lightning crashed behind him. "Even if you did break me, you couldn't kill me."
"Now I know that you don't know what you are talking about."
"We are part of each other, Joker," Batman said, pointing to Joker, "and I know that you can feel it. Neither of us is complete without the other. You would never be able to push the button, no matter how hard you tried."
"You're lying!" Joker said, and he finger touched the very tip of the button. "I could press this button right now, and think nothing of it."
"You're wrong, Joker," Batman replied, "More than you have ever been wrong before."
The Joker walked away from the machine and went to the net. He watched Batman for the longest time.
Then Joker shook his head. "No, you're the one that is wrong, Bats," he said, as he started towards the machine again to push on the button, "and I will prove it right now."
But at the moment that he started to walk, the Joker saw a faint flash of a small buzz saw in Batman's hand. If he used that, he would be able to escape!
Joker looked frantically at the machine, thinking on what to do. He could never get to the machine in time…
Suddenly, a spark came from the machine. Then another… and another… until suddenly a blast shook the machine, and Joker heard a death scream unlike anything he had ever heard before.
As he shut his eyes from the flashes of light that were running all over the place, he started to smell burnt flesh.
But where was it…?
Then he realized what had happened.
As suddenly as it began, it then ended. Joker then looked up, and slowly turned around towards where Batman had been. When he did, he realized how valid the term "had been" was.
The net was now on the floor, around a huddled, blackened form that had been Batman. Joker took a few steps towards the body, and then knelt down. The net had fallen apart due to the immense amount of electricity that had gone through it. Due to that, Batman's head was hanging out of the net, and had fallen backwards.
Joker looked at it for a few moments. The face was not recognizable.
But how had the short happened? He didn't do anything to make that happen.
But as he thought, he realized what he had done. It hit him suddenly, as if he had been in denial up to that point.
Batman was dead.
Dead.
Was it really possible? Did it really happen?
"He's dead…" Joker thought, shaking his head. He couldn't believe it. It had actually worked. "Batman is really, really dead."
But as he thought the last word, something that he could not describe began to take hold of him. Almost as if he was being sucked inside out. It was excruciating.
"What the hell…?" Joker was able say, just as he felt himself… evaporate.
Then he was gone.