Author's note: This one-shot is, almost verbatim, the write-up of a dream I had last month. What this says about my psyche, I really don't want to know. It's also the first story I've written with a definitely TDK Joker firmly in the leading role.
awareness fades in again, and I think I am imagining the sensation of sitting next to him, in the dark. Although I have no sense of touch, no real skin to rub against the pyjamas I imagine I am wearing, the mood is sedentary.
There are not enough words in common language for how one moves and exists when one is merely a voice in the mind of another, and that other sits before you, hunched over his crossed knees like a pained spider. We have no being, no substance, no purpose unless pulled forth by the endless roiling of his mind.
If you were to see him now, you would say he was quite alone, as you wouldn't see us. But I have to use words you'll understand, concepts you're comfortable with, or there will be no story at all.
Fine then. I sit next to him and he starts to talk to me. The room is almost perfectly dark save for slits of grimy light falling across his bared back from above. He does this a lot, to all of us. He is never truly alone. It's crowded in here and not everyone's too well-behaved, a bit like a schoolbus on the final day of term. Fellow voices fade in and out of awareness alongside me.
Sometimes I imagine he likes talking to me more than he likes talking to the others, but it's a fallacy. He just likes talking.
Let's be clear about this: I am not a voice which tells him what to do. I have never whispered that he should kill them all, that he should set that fire, punch that child. I am mute. We all are. It's how he likes it.
The Joker holds the shreds of the poster in his hands, playing cat-a-cradle with them, and speaks sometimes aloud in a low, strained voice, and sometimes inside his head so that only we can hear him. The painted white of his face is haggard and smudged, lines of his pale but pinker skin showing through in furrows across his brow. His sickly green hair catches briefly in the filtered light and almost glows. Some of the green strands are matted and tacky brown with his blood. He still breathes hard, raggedly, from the chase.
I think that he is badly hurt; I think that he is close, in fact, to being beaten. Images of Batman strobe through his thoughts, all mixed up with recent punches, kicks, falls from buildings. Bruises and broken bones flicker in front of me, the phantoms of his pain. A sensation of flight and then of hiding. He is hiding here and he is helpless, friendless, except for us, his constant companions. Too hurt, and too hunted. No way out, and no way to win.
Except that there is always a way to win, and he says as much to me. He starts to arrange the shreds of paper in front of him so that the pictures and words begin to swim together out of the mess.
Batman Appreciation Valentine Convention, 238-242 Marine Plaza, 14 February 2012. Raise money for good causes! Support Batman!
The picture is badly drawn, but it is certainly Batman, the ears a little long, the mouth below the line of the mask far too smiling and affable.
Bring a friend!
The Joker makes it clear what he thinks of this and I listen, mutely. His speech is suspiciously mild, his tones low and reasonable. His pointed tongue flicks out, runs across his lips and up into the corners of his mouth, laving the ridges of scars reflexively as he talks. And thinks.
Bring a friend!
"Say hello," says the Joker thickly, before crowing out a harsh clattering laugh, "to my little friend!"
The straight razor has been hiding in the dark at his side, and although of course I knew it was there, he is almost quicker than his own thoughts as he pulls it and starts to use it.
I am mute and intangible and only exist inside his head. I cannot shout or be sick or break into a horrified cold sweat. But I can be grateful, and oh I am grateful when pseudo-consciousness fades, driven away by his own corporeal pain, because the blood is beginning to drip in steady rhythm and the sound of parted flesh is like the sound of rending silk and his laughter oh god his screams of laughter
awareness returns and I can hear a woman laughing. This time the mood is ambulatory. I think I imagine I am walking through a room that looks like a slightly downmarket hotel near Gotham Marina. The conference suite, perhaps.
The Joker moves before me, his now clothed shoulders rigid with controlled effort. He isn't talking to me. This is one of those voyeuristic times, a time when he has brought me out not to talk but to watch. And not just me. The place feels crowded, inside of his head and out of it. All the little fractured parts of his personality, pushing against each other for the best spot, wanting a good view from this psychological peanut gallery. As I imagine I walk beside him I can feel the hundreds of others close at my sides.
But even the real people, the human corporeal people here are not quite normal. Many of them are overweight: many of them are drunk: all of them are hopeful. There are paper plates and plastic cups and a bowl of punch that looks quite luridly awful. (Even the Joker evidently thinks this: the punch must be truly offensive). Some of the women wear classy evening gowns with discreet diamante bat necklaces, others cheap t-shirts with the bat-symbol emblazoned on the breast.
Breast is an operative word. Most of the people here are female. Almost all of them, in fact, and the few men here flaring with even greater hope than the women. There's money here along with hope, and desire, and good intentions. Bleeding heart liberals, the Joker says to us, and laughs silently at our private joke.
And a lot of the women are young, very young. Just girls, really. The feeling changes, an ambulatory feeling still but also a feeling of observation. I am looking from side to side. Everywhere the Batman, clippings from newspapers, lovingly created but terrible drawings, grainy photographs. He is on banners and display boards and the covers of self-published magazines. Some of the girls are even dressed as him, the synthetic costumes clinging too close to heavy bodies.
Some of them, glimpsed peripherally as we move through the crowd, are even more daringly gaudy in green and purple with pale mask makeup and scarlet maws. How better to attract the personal attention of the revered figure than by dressing as his hated enemy?
The Joker sings aloud to himself, to us all circling him like a shoal of silver fish around the fisherman's lamp, quietly, as he rounds a rickety table: "The things we do for love…the things we do for love…"
He is within the very church of his tormentor, watching their quaint rituals and seeing their worshipful faces, and he flits between giggles and rage. Some of us giggle in response, the echoes of one of the few sounds we are allowed to make rattling around inside his head like peas in a jar. I do not.
Because I am imagining myself being abruptly pulled very close to the Joker's side. He is in pain, so much more pain than before, and he is moving like a marionette under taut rein. His dingy purple-clad back is as straight as a ramrod. His greased lips are almost chapped redder with the constant, instinctive passage of his tongue. If I could feel the sensation, it would be like holding him up. Sometimes I wonder if I am that tiny part of him which still pities himself. His strength is draining away steadily, but as it goes his glee grows only stronger.
"Oh, wow."
The voice is corporeal and not one of us. It comes from a young girl who must be all of seventeen years old. She is wearing a t-shirt that says "WWBD - What Would Batman Do?" in big, cheaply printed letters. Her fingernails are painted black and the varnish is already chipped. The words from her shirt bounce about from one of us to the others as the Joker reads them, absorbs them and finds them funny.
"Oh, wow," she repeats. "Your costume is great. Are you one of mom's friends? Her friends always have the best stuff."
The Joker turns his head very slightly further so that he can peep at her over the square pad of his coat shoulder. I see her through his eyes, of course. She is thin and wears too much makeup and has the nasal twang of the higher end of Gotham's received pronunciation. Her long blonde hair would make a good rope. He does not consider whether she is attractive or not, but he thinks: she's almost perfect.
"Your mom," the Joker says, in his best reasonable voice, "and who would she be, exactly?"
"Oh, sorry. Guess you're not. Yeah. My mom organises these whole things. She's such a great Bat-fan. So am I, of course."
And now, in his eyes, she is entirely perfect.
The Joker smiles painfully, and all of us silent watchers rock in the sudden wave of his joy .
"It's just so great to meet other fans," he says, ducking his greasy head, self-deprecating. The streaks of dried blood on his scalp are suddenly much more obvious. His physical pain ebbs, subsumed by the glory to come. His thoughts are all trained on his own clothes. "I like your shirt. What would Batman do, huh? Kinda…funny."
She smiles. He thinks she is amazing and perfect and vacuous. He can't wait to see what that doll-like, cow-like face will do when he -
"I know, right? A lot of people think it's sort of disrespectful, cos of what would Jesus do and everything, but I just think it shows how much, y'know, trust we all have in Batman. That we trust him to do what's right."
He is dizzy with growing loss of blood and possible concussion and the maybe four or five broken bones in his body: he cannot wait any longer. The girl screams shrilly as he rips open his tightly buttoned coat, waistcoat and shirt and drops of blood fly out to hit her face. The Joker's joy and triumph flood through me, through my fellows, and we are almost swept away by the intensity of it.
But not quite. Did I mention he likes us to watch?
Now I think I feel as if I am in front of him, seeing his bared chest thin and heaving with the effort and almost-ecstasy of it all. He spreads his arms and raises them, cruciform. The blood has stained his body red from neck to belt. The torn clothes drop from his raised hands, and they are so heavy with the sodden weight of his blood that they fall to the floor more like beefsteaks than cloth. The shallow, graceful shapes the razor has made in his own skin gape like long mouths as he moves, and more blood slowly dribbles out. A bat-signal in gore. Batman's famous mark, etched in flesh, stretches the entire breadth of the Joker's torso, the tips of the wings brushing the shoulders, the ears of the bat carving painful points between the rise of the collarbone.
The girl is shrieking like an overheated kettle, the people milling about nearby are drawing back in fright and disgust, and the blood looks so very bright under the cheap strip lighting.
"Come on," the Joker murmurs, aloud. "Come on, come on, come ON…" Inside, he is screaming now now now now now NOW, because his legs are about to buckle and it's only our strength, the knowledge of a double audience, that holds him up.
"I've opened my heart to you, darling," he coos, turning to the shrieking teenager, "literally. Won't you be my valentine?"
He is trembling: he is almost falling, but he is so happy about his plan that he is like a swooning maiden in the throes of her first love. I can feel the seductive dizziness eating up my insubstantial companions until I am almost the only one left.
And Batman smashes through the conference room windows, bowling over two or three overweight women and a man dressed in a bat costume. That man flies into the side of the refreshment table. I can hear his neck as it snaps. The Joker breathes out calm and slowly, a sound unheard in the resulting chaos by all but me. He finally falls to his knees, blood trickling into his lap. By the time Batman reaches him, he has cradled one hand inside the other and is watching his fingers tremble with strain in quiet fascination. He is unarmed, I know: the straight razor has been left behind, having served its purpose.
More screams now. The overweight women are injured. The costumed man is seen to be dead. Batman is deaf to it all, intent only on the shrieking girl with the Joker's blood all over her and the shaking, beaten figure at his feet.
All eyes are on us. I can hear the Joker speaking inside his head, and full of mirth, he asks me what would Batman do?
A rhetorical question, as I cannot speak. Answer: Batman punches him in a sure, swift motion and the gauntleted fist dissolves my awareness in a shower of pain sparks
A trickle of consciousness, now. Awareness fading
in and out again like a
but occasionally moments of
Seems hard to keep hold of the Joker's thoughts as he drifts. At one point he holds up his shackled wrist to the guard and they bring him a newspaper, holding it up so he can read it. I think I imagine I am sitting on the end of the bed when he reads it, in my pyjamas as before. He is healing slowly, incredibly pallid with blood loss. He may bear the marks in his chest until the day he dies. But naturally I know without him needing to speak to me that he thinks it was worth it.
The headline says: "Batman murders man at charity event held in his honour."
The Joker looks over to where I think I would be sitting if I existed, and he smiles with a flicker of that ever-active tongue. He has been to the very temple of his enemy and even in defeat he has set up the moneylenders' tables.
I win, he says. Say. You wanna know how I got these scars?