"I had a dream last night.
I don't usually dream, but this one was special. I liked this dream.
Do you want to know what it was about?
I dreamed that I was standing at a sink. I don't remember turning it on, but it was running for an extended period of time and I was washing my hands. The water had turned cold and yet I continued rinsing my hands, scrubbing away as much filth as I could until my hands were raw and pruned. I can't tell you how long I was rinsing them. It seemed like as soon as I fell asleep I had begun washing my hands, though I knew that there were actions that I had committed before going to my sink and turning on the faucet. The endless stream of water started to spurt and it was going crazy. I continued washing my hands when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the water turns a deep red. I was surprised!
Do you know why?
Red is such a bright color. It hurts my eyes whenever I look at it, but there are other times where I simply cannot turn away from it. It pulls me in, draws me closer until I have to force myself to look away. I must admit that it gets hard not looking at this beautiful and disgusting color, but I manage. Like any other man I have my vices. Colors happen to be one and mine just happens to be red.
Anyways..
The water is now red. I paused and I remember thinking, 'Am I seeing this correctly?' Indeed I was. The water was now red and it wasn't just a different color. Its consistency had changed and it seemed.. goopier. It was gross to touch, but I had to wash my hands. I had to cleanse myself of the filth that had riddled my fingers from the moment I went to sleep. So I picked up the soap and began washing my hands.
Do you want to know what I discovered as I was washing my hands in the red, goopy, water?
It was blood.
How delightful! I was literally washing my hands in blood! Well, you must imagine how excited I was to notice this. People always say things along those lines, you know. Washing hands in blood and what not, but here I was actually doing it. I began to laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh because I was doing something that everyone else always said would happen. Keep doing my line of work and it's hard not to see why, you catch my drift? I was never one to be a crowd pleaser so I turned the faucet off and dried my hands. The towel was red, the sink was red, the soap was red. Everything was red. It is a beautiful color, but I hate it.
After i dried my hands I turned around and - now this is the real zinger here - there were dead people lying all over the floor! Oh, what a tragedy! They were all faces I knew and even people I know today. You were there, you know, among those corpses just lying about like trash littered on the ground and forgotten. I remember thinking 'How disgusting!' and began walking on all the dead bodies to the door.
But the more I walked, the further away the door became..
I don't know why. Don't interrupt me while I'm talking.
I reached out towards the knob, grasping for it. I have no idea why I wanted to get out of the room so badly, but still the door continued running from me.
So I chased it.
I began running on all of the bodies. Heck! I was running for so long that I wasn't even tired. It became as involuntary as walking or blinking or breathing and I was caught in another endless loop of mindless movement. Oo! I hated that part. I wanted out! And yet here I was a prisoner in my own dream. Well, finally, I had run out of bodies and something funny happened as they do only in dreams:
The floor vanished.
I could only step where there were corpses, but because there were no more dead bodies to play hopscotch on, I couldn't reach the door. I sat down, trying to figure a way out. I thought maybe I could line the bodies up or make a catapult from the bones, but nothing worked. I couldn't even lift the bodies for that matter! It was a real pain..
So I stood there helplessly watching as my only exit from the red bathroom danced away in the distance like memories of days past.
Ah.. Woe is me.
But you know that funny thing?
When I could no longer see the door I was ecstatic! I had spent so much time wasting away trying to open up the door even though I knew what was behind it. I knew that at soon as I opened the door, it would release me from my dream and I would be in a hallway or another room. No, the door was too predictable. I couldn't - didn't - want to go through the door. The door had nothing interesting for me. It was predictable! Boring! Mediocre at best! But you know what wasn't?
No, I mean it, guess.
No, that's not it.
The corpses! All of the dead bodies that I was running on!
Why, there were hundreds of those! Thousands even! And I had only ran on top of them in one direction. Imagine how far they could take me and what was at the end of those corpses. If I ran out of corpses the other way, then where would I have ended up. And what if there were even more corpses? Would I have more possibilities and places to explore? If I killed enough people to fill out the rest of the space where other dead bodies needed to be, would I find something?
Did I?
Haha, wouldn't you like to know.
No, I don't think I did, but if there was anything important that I could take from my dream it is that my road is paved with a priceless inexhaustable resource that is illegal for me to obtain. But that ain't gonna stop me. I think I'm going to continue running and skipping over these limp babboons. Maybe one day I'll go through that door and see what was really there."
"And what if there isn't anything there?" Asked Dr. Quinzel, "What if it's just a blank wall. A door that leads to nowhere."
Joker was surprised to hear the question, but he began to laugh, tossing his head back. "That's a good one, doc! You're somethin' else! A door to nowhere! HA! What a gag!"
"Please answer the question."
Joker stopped laughing almost instantaneously. With a straight face he looked Dr. Quinzel straight in her eyes. "Well, then I guess the joke's on me."
And he laughed.
