"Jonathan... Crane. So even the little shits in lab coats who spend their time wiping freaks' asses can have a name..."
He was a little shorter than me, his face lean and self-effacing, a discreet pair of square glasses on his nose. He was nervously wriggling a flap of his blouse, and his faded grey-green eyes fled my soft, warm gaze.
"I have no intention of killing you, Jonathan. I'm here to talk, that's all."
In reality, I didn't give a damn about him, his gown and his glasses. Those who treat the insane are perhaps the blandest of people: how can one be so narrow-minded as to consider other men as sick, without even trying to think like them, to understand them? It's always baffled me...
"Arthur Fleck," he pointed to me with a trembling voice. "You are a sick man, a madman, a criminal in spite of himself. You killed your mother without knowing your father, you were mocked and rejected for your nervous laughter, you are a failed artist, a humorless comedian, you created chaos and punished those who didn't want to understand your morality and your turn of mind, live on TV" he continued. "So you deserve to be hospitalized, medicated, monitored, ostracized, because you are dangerous and evil.
"In that case, why don't you kill me instead?"
I spread my arms wide, my chest puffed out, a bright smile on my face, and glared at the cops in the corner of my eye, all around the post office where I was standing, ready to shoot. They had prevented me from sending the scalp of the moustache. A pity for the widow and fatherless...
Jonathan nervously fiddled with the name tag on his lab coat and mentally made some notes: Athur Fleck did not fear death. He loved chaos and did not fear death. A nihilist, an anarchist, a madman, that was Athur Fleck.
"Don't you get it yet?..."
I felt desperate in the face of such stupidity. I am not Arthur Fleck.
"Arthur Fleck is nothing more than a joke - a black humour joke, I grant you, a humourless joke because he is a failed artist. But a joke nonetheless. A fib. A lie. A story we tell children before they go to sleep - a legend, perhaps, for you, from the fascination I see in your eyes."
Jonathan thought: but who could the man in front of me be, then? If he is not Arthur Fleck, if he is not simply that living joke of the laughing fool, the killer orphan, the monster in spite of himself, the outcast we follow, the humourless comedian... who can he be?
"I was bitten by my wife, then abandoned by my dog, who cheated on me with an alley cat. I worked in a circus where a parrot drove me crazy. I couldn't laugh because of face cramps, so I painted a wide smile on my face to finally be accepted. I had a twin brother who died one day, committed suicide: I decided to be happy for two for the rest of my life."
Incomprehension. Glassy eyes of a dead fish.
I leaned more towards this idiot, who thought he was smart because of all his shitty psychoanalysis degrees.
"You get it? I am who I want to be, I just have to cry for a while in front of a shrink like you, and bam! Magic! I change my story and my identity!"
Jonhatan seemed even more outdated than Freud's theories...
The post office building exploded. The post office building exploded and we were both thrown a few metres away. The policemen were dead, most of them.
I took a stunned Jonathan Crane on my shoulders. He was light, probably because of all the fascinated emptiness I had read in his eyes. I fled in a shower of embers, in the dark, carried by the chaos, which also made me invisible.
