Clayface
1
The patient files for Arkham were stored in a long room full of file cabinets. The majority of the files were kept on computers so the file room was as quiet and stale as an old attic. Trista's arm was now encased in a solid cast and she asked Hillerman to help her with the boxes. When Trista had tried to pull up the files for the various super criminals in Arkham, they were all under a classification she hadn't seen before. S.C.P. An acronym Trista guessed meant super criminal patient, or special criminal patients. Hillerman said he thought it meant special containment procedures. Either way, all files designated SCP were locked and Adams told her even she couldn't access them. This was unexpected. Trista and Hillerman had assumed Adams was the top of the pecking order. Apparently someone else was keeping tabs on the super criminals. The only clue was the access denied message which bore the name and logo for the SCP Corporation. Adams refused to give Trista a straight answer about the company, only saying they were a corporate sponsor for the asylum. Hillerman remembered seeing logos for it on supplies and on the security guards for that wing of the asylum. He said they'd showed up 8 years ago and built a new wing with all new security features just for the SCPs. Trista couldn't access those files without going through the SCP corporation and she didn't have time to bother with it. She would have to rely on the files kept before the facility switched to digital, which was about 8 years ago when SCP corp revamped everything. The files she was looking for may not even be here. If this corporation locked up these files for some reason, they must have ordered any physical copies destroyed or transferred to them. Every drawer threw up a cloud of dust and Trista covered her nose and mouth with her sleeve. She decided to look for a name she knew first. Johnathan Crane. The Scarecrow as he is more well known. An ex-psychiatrist and sadist who enjoys scaring his victims to death. There was a faded C on this drawer and she hoped Crane's file was here, if not she'd have to start looking somewhere outside the usual patient files. Clements, Craig, Cramer, Crandall, Custer. Damn. No Crane. Now she'd have to start pulling down boxes.
"No one's been in here for ages." Hillerman said, looking through a file.
"I kind of miss the old paper and file methods. Holding it, organizing it, waiting for a fax or a print out. Everything is on a screen now." Trista was only half listening and started directing Hillerman to the boxes she wanted.
A few hours later she and Hillerman had gone through most of the boxes and cabinets she could see and was about ready to give up. She blew her nose for the hundredth time and left a grey Rorschach impression of dust and mucus on the napkin. When she looked for a trashcan to toss it in she spotted an old box behind a cabinet. It was sideways as though it had fallen back there and been forgotten. Her hope returned and she had Hillerman fish it out. Bingo. The box had a "to be destroyed" stamp on the lid and each file inside had one as well. This was like finding lost gold. She carried the box into an empty office and began going through the files. She set aside the ones she'd already interviewed and had a decent pile left. There were even a few she hadn't heard of. One was a patient only known as John Doe who had murdered a mother and son.
"Who is John Doe?" Hillerman shrugged.
"We'd all like to know that. He came in 10 years ago. No ID on file anywhere. He'd killed a young boy, made his own mother do it and then killed her too. It was awful. He talks about what he did but not who he is or why." Trista looked at the picture, the man looked absolutely uninteresting, a fade-into-the-wall kind. The service man look. Another was Patient 1419, Brad "Clayface" Lee. This one held her interest because of the extensive containment proceedures for him. He was to be kept in an air tight tank at all times, no lighting necessary, sealed ventilators, a two-way intercom for communication., no person allowed within the tank for any amount of time, cell employs a self-cleaning system which activates automatically daily and drains through a secure filtration system to prevent escape. It sounded like they were containing a biohazard.
"What about Brad Lee?" Hillerman looked surprised.
"He's in there? He was just an old junkie. Came in a few times to detox. What does it say about him?" Hillerman looked at the file. His expression turned troubled.
"The tank." He said coldly. Trista looked at him with interest.
"There is a tank in the asylum. It was part of the kitchen area until they built a new one in the new wing. We were always told to stay away from it. No one knew what it was for except Adams and the head psychiatrist at the time, Dr. Riser." Trista put the file on top and closed the box.
"Looks like I've got a mystery to solve." Hillerman raised an eyebrow as if to say 'did you really just say that?'. Trista smirked and took the box in her good arm.
"You happen to have Dr. Riser's number?" Hillerman looked up and thought a moment.
"I'll have to check my Rolodex." Trista looked at him and raised an eyebrow as if to say 'did you really just say Rolodex?'.
2
Dr. Riser had been head of psychiatry at Arkham for 12 years before he retired. He lived about 3 hours away from Gotham and Trista agreed to meet him at his home. Dr. Steven Riser lived in a traditional colonial style house in the country. The type of place you'd expect a doctor to retire to. Trista saw a swimming pool and a small golf green with a flag in the backyard. He met her at the screened in porch that circled the entire outside of the house and he offered her iced tea, which she accepted.
"Well now, it has been quite a while since I've talked of Arkham, though it will never be far from my thoughts. A place like that, and the people there, they have a way of staying with you. When they came and gave me my papers I couldn't help but feel relief, though it was mixed with a kind of regret. When you work in a place as long as that you can't help but get attached to it, even a place like Arkham. Well the facility was under new management and they were cleaning house, so to speak. Since my 401k was looking fine and I was nearly old enough to start getting my social security back, I decided it was time to hang up my hat. I'm sure you didn't come here to listen to a senile old man's maunderings. What is it you'd like to discuss?" Trista pulled the file out and laid it on the wicker table between them.
"Its about a patient there at Arkham. He's been kept from the staff and this was the only record I could find. Do you remember him?" Riser squinted at the papers, looking through his gold rimmed glasses.
"Clayface. Oh my, yes I remember that one. The most bizarre case I'd ever seen. I don't rightly know where to begin." He took a sip of tea and looked out at the forest at the edge of his property. His face sank and Trista could see it growing pale as he remembered.
"We didn't have a name for it at first. Everyone just called it patient 1419. When we received word of its arrival, we were ordered to prepare a sealed room of some kind to keep it in. We settled on the old cooler in the kitchen area because it had a lock and a small window, and we had it made up into a cell. When they brought it in, it was covered in wraps and belts, head to toe. It looked like an old mummy being brought into its tomb. They put it in the cell and sealed the door. I read the reports from the police and it was like reading a fantasy novel. This thing was almost a creature without species. That it had once been human was clear from the features, but they seemed to shift and change at will. It had been seen as taking human shape before, but the reports all detailed different shapes at different times. It had eyes and mouth only intermittently, arms and legs of various number and use, no organ was consistent to either function or position. It was reported to be seen sprouting sex organs and opening rectums to defecate. They tried to ID the thing but it had no fingerprints and a DNA sample contained the DNA of several people. The only name that came up with a record was on Bradly Bartram Lee, so the police report claimed it as its identity. I remembered Brad as a patient, he'd been hopelessly addicted to heroin for years and came to us when he wanted to kick the habit, whether by his own choice or by the state. I couldn't believe the reports at first, so I went to the cell." The doctor sat back and seemed to struggle with himself.
"I looked in and the wraps and belts were all piled where they had left it. In the corner there was what looked like someone hunched over. When I turned on the interior light for the cooler, it recoiled and I saw that it was not human. It looked like the torso of an obese man, it was flesh colored and there were small hairs in patches. I watched as it undulated and a small cave seemed to form near the center, like a mouth opening. There was movement inside the opening and an eye opened within, looking at me. I shut off the light and left, nearly running." Trista couldn't believe this. Could such a creature really exist?
"We tried to communicate with it. When an orderly fainted inside the cell and was nearly enveloped by it, we gave strict orders not to enter the cell with it without full hazard suits. It seemed to give off an anesthetizing gas that will cause a person to lose consciousness. Analysis of the gas showed a mixture of narcotics and tranquilizers. The reports claim it was responsible for an unknown number of deaths, though they were unable to prove anything because there were no bodies or witnesses. It seemed an autonomous organism with no intelligence or will beyond survival. When presented with food it would extend a protoplasmic limb and pull it into a mouth, tray and all. It would later expel the tray or any indigestible pieces. Eyes formed in response to light, ears opened in response to sound, mouths opened in response to food. There were times when it assumed a human form, but it was always slightly off, never looking like any one person, its features dissolving in and out of focus." Trista shook her head.
"This sounds like a monster. Why isn't it in a lab somewhere?" Dr. Riser shook his head and shrugged.
"The courts are still arguing its species. It is being treated as a human being until such a time as its species can be determined. We tried many times to reach it. We left books in its cell, a television, a radio. They were all ignored or partially consumed. Samples of the things cells revealed it to be composed of what doctors refer to as UDT, undifferentiated tissue. This is a substance similar to stem cells and allows it to form any organ it needs, including bone and hair, provided it has the raw materials to produce them. Maybe we could harvest it to help the sick the way they want to do with stem cells but I don't think I would trust anything that came from that monster."
"We left a poster of a man in its cell for 2 weeks. It began to assume the shape of the man on the poster. Once it had fully assumed the man's form we attempted to talk to it again." The doctor shuddered and rubbed his forehead.
"God help us, we sent Dr. Shaffer in to speak to it, in a hazmat of course. The thing looked at him and it smiled, you could see its teeth at least. There were too many teeth. It turned to him and it looked like a drunk man trying to do an about-face. Dr. Shaffer tried talking with it. The thing started to repeat the words back at him like a parrot, its voice was wrong. At first it was too low and wet, then it shot up to a falsetto, like someone fiddling with the pitch control on a soundboard. It walked toward him and it even walked wrong. Its legs lifted too high and came down twisted and awkward, its back arched forward and back like a boxer who'd taken too many blows to the head. It reached out like it was offering a hug and Dr. Shaffer screamed to be let out. The thing kept repeating 'Please' over and over, imitating the panic in Shaffer's voice. When we tried to open the door the thing leaped with a quickness it had never shown before and grabbed the handle of the door, pulling it shut with a terrible strength. I was screaming for them to get the door open but the thing had jammed it somehow. I could still hear Dr. Shaffer screaming inside and pounding on the walls. By the time the maintenance man had appeared with a crowbar, the screams inside had stopped. We pulled on masks and pried open the door. Even through the filters, I could smell it. I prayed I wouldn't vomit into my mask. The thing sat convulsing in the corner, its previous form dissolving into the mass of its body with a hideous grin. Dr. Shaffer had disappeared without a trace, only the hazmat suit and his clothes, torn open like a candy wrapper, remained. We took down the poster and locked the cell. We never tried to communicate with it again." Trista's mouth felt dry and she took a sip of the tea. "Where did it come from?" Dr. Riser shrugged helplessly.
"We don't know. It was roaming the streets and sewers before it was caught by the Batman and brought to us. That such a thing can exist in this world, well, it makes you realize how little we know about the world."
3
Trista tossed a token into the turnstile and headed for the uptown A train. Her whole day had been a bust. The police reports named only one identifying witness in Brad Lee's case, Ernest Black, a homeless drug addict. She must have talked to every panhandler, junkie, and wino in the East Side but nobody knew Ernest Black or Brad Lee. Half of them thought she was a cop and wouldn't say anything, the other half thought she wanted to interview them and started unspooling their long and sorted history while Trista looked for a way to duck out unnoticed. She hopped onto the subway and sat, her feet tired from walking and her neck tense with frustration. She looked around the subway car, a few people sat watching their phones or reading the paper. A ratty looking man in a lost-and-found overcoat sat slumped in one of the seats. Trista considered asking him about Brad but she looked at his face and saw he was in a deep trance, probably drifting somewhere around the stratosphere. An electric buzzer sounded and the doors began to close. Before they did a man in a brown suit darted between people and jumped through the closing doors. The doors closed on the man's hat, a ragged fedora, and he let out an exhausted laugh, snatching at his hair which stood up in wild white curls, looking for his hat. He turned around and snatched it out of the closed doors, placing it crookedly on his head. The subway started moving and he looked back at the people outside the train.
"So long, flatfoot!" He shouted with a gravely voice that sounded like he'd been gargling turpentine. His suit, Trista saw, was not actually brown but had once been black, the stress points faded to an almost flesh tone and the edges frayed. The jacket hung open and was covered in a constellation of cigarette burns, or bullet holes. He moseyed over with an unusual gait and sat down next to the vacant junkie. "Grassed on me, he did." He said morosely, patting the man on the shoulder.
"I could feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves. They thought they could tail me in a blue trench coat and I wouldn't savvy. No sir." He leaned to the side, putting his feet up on the man's back like a sofa armrest. He glanced over at Trista and grinned.
"Junkies." He said, motioning to the man he was using as a footrest.
"Virtual absence of cerebral event. Over liberated, you might say. Morphine having depressed his hypothalamus, seat of libido and emotion, and since the front brain is only active in response to back brain titillation; being a vicarious type citizen can only get his kicks from behind, we have no emotional connotation for him and therefore, no interest. He is aware of our presence but since it has no affective connotation, his affect having been disconnected by the junk man for the non-payment, he is not interested in our doings. Go or come, shit or fuck yourself with a rasp or an asp, the dead and the junkie don't care." Trista was surprised at how articulate the man was, considering his appearance.
"And who might you be?" She asked.
He looked at her squinty with a clever grin.
"I might be anybody. I might be Fingers Shatner, the afterbirth tycoon, or Assad McCoy, the shoe store kid. Maybe I'm just an honest popcorn john heading to the nearest Oyster Bar (the best dive in town) where I call the counterman by his first name. Who I might be is dependent on YOU might be? And who might you be?" Trista was starting to like this character.
"Trista Martin. I'm a writer." The man put a hand to his face in mock surprise.
"Oh my stars and garters! A writer? I had that myself once but I got cured of that. 8 years without relapse, honest to god!" He sits up and crosses his legs primly.
"You seem like the character collector type, a paper pusher. Newspaper or magazine?"
"Magazine." She said smiling in spite of her sore feet.
"I'm looking for someone. Ernest Black. Do you know him?" The man's eyebrows went up, wrinkling his forehead into a maze of skin.
"Ernie the Leech? Land sakes, I can't see why you'd want to talk to that old cunt. He got that name after he'd lost all his teeth and his nose and pallet were eaten away sniffing H. He's got his round disc mouth like the mouth of a lamprey. Last I heard he'd taken the cure up by the train yard on Pascoe Cove. Two kids found him under a boxcar, stiff as a poker." Trista slumped.
"So he's dead?" She rubbed her forehead irritably.
"He was my last lead." The man looked a her sideways.
"Anywhere the Leech would lead you is no place a healthy body should go. So where is it you thought you might go?" Trista glanced at the junkie who was still slumped over and absent.
"I'm trying to find out more about Brad Lee. Clayface." The man's eyes lit up.
"Clayface Lee? What would Ernie the Leech know about him? To my knowledge the two didn't know each other from Adam." Trista looked puzzled.
"The police report listed Ernest Black as the only identifying witness." The man threw back his head and laughed with a mouth of gold teeth.
"Well that's Ernie the fuzz lover for you. Always quick to grass on anyone so long as it buys him a couple hours of warmth. I can tell you in confidence he was due for a hot shot anyway. This is a vial of poison junk given to informants or nuisance junkies for liquidation purposes. The hot shot is usually strychnine since it looks and tastes like junk. They never even get the needle out of their arm, they don't if the shot is right. Those kids probably found him with a needle full of clotted blood sticking out of a blue arm. The way I see it, the fuzz must have needed a stool pigeon to ID Clayface for their reports so they could hide the fact they knew exactly who he was." Trista sat up with interest.
"The police knew Brad Lee?" The man reached into the junkie's pocket absently and pulled out a dollar and a crumpled cigarette. He put the cigarette in his mouth and the dollar in his pocket.
"Knew him? He worked for em. Brad Clayface Lee was the best narcotics agent in the industry. He was whats known on the streets as an exterminator. Pest control. If a junkie or a pusher was making trouble, or might make trouble, they send Lee to score off them and pull a bust." Trista shook her head.
"But he was a heroin addict. He couldn't be a cop." The man grinned, flashing his gold teeth.
"This is Gotham, sweetheart. Cops are just crooks with a different angle and a better con. Lee didn't start out as a junkie, no one ever does, but you can't spend all your time moving through the world of junk without picking up a habit. It turned out to be the best move of his career. A pusher sees you shoot up, they trust you not to be fuzz. Lee was the exception to that rule and he twisted one pusher after another." Trista was in shock. She knew the GCPD was corrupt but this was something else.
"What happened to him? What made him what he is now?" The man sat back looking at Trista skeptically.
"This isn't your typical news story, my dear. You're stepping into the invisible world of junkies where magic, taboos, and secrets reign and truth has neither heft nor lift. I could tell you the story but I couldn't promise it would be believable, scrutable, or in any way comprehensible to an outsider such as yourself." Trista considered him. He seemed to know more about this than anyone she'd talked to so far. He seemed more than a little crazy but if she could find any kind of truth in what he might say, it was worth it.
"I want to hear it." She said. He grinned and nodded. "Son cosas de la vida." He said with a shrug.
"Not here though. A story like this needs atmosphere, preparation. Lets head over to the tunnel and I'll spin you a tale over a barrel fire and a pot of mulligan stew. But first-." He taps his arm.
"Duty calls. I gotta see man about a monkey. Story like this needs steady nerves and my hour glass of junk is running low. Just need to make it before the shakes set in." Trista hesitated.
"You want me to follow a junkie into the streets of Gotham to an unfamiliar place with no witnesses?" She looked at him with a cocked eye brow and the man put a hand to his chest in parody of an offended dowager.
"Well I never! You have nothing to fear from me, my dear. Unless you've got a concealed weapon in those panties, you've nothing I'm interested in. I'm Tommy Wades, the last of the big time losers! Heir of the Wades family, inventors of the Wades adding machine. I'm as queer as a three dollar bill. I've had more fags in me than an English pub ashtray. I'm the oldest queen in the upper Bowery. My reputation is beyond reproach. Ask anyone. Hard Luck Sam here will vouch for me, right Sammy?" He leaned over and put a finger to the slumped man's chin, moving the jaw up and down while he spoke out of the side of his mouth in a ventriloquist falsetto.
"Oh yeah, Tommy here is a hep cat. We go way back. Would eat his own hat before he'd step on a crack." Trista laughed until tears came to her eyes while Tommy bowed sedately, hat in hand.
"Alright, where do we stop?"
They walked out into the Gotham streets. Tommy had a strange gait and seemed to be half stumbling and half dancing. She followed him until they came to the corner of Kane and West 5th. He looked around and Trista asked him who he was looking for.
"Oh a junkie never has to look far for a pusher. His need conjures him like a bad spirit. Ah, Old Ike." He motioned to a man sitting at the counter of a coffee bar. They walked in and Tommy oozed up to the counter, drumming his fingers and flashing the man a golden smile.
"Old Ike, the man I like. How're the huevos hanging?" The man looked at Tommy with indifference.
"You got something for me?" He said in a low whisper.
"Got 20 eggs for Fats. Need a ten tube advance of course." The man raised an eyebrow, the effort seemed to strain him.
"On spec?" Tommy put his hands on his hips.
"So I don't got the 20 eggs in my pocket, I'm telling you, its jellied consumme" Trista looked around nervously, the other patrons didn't seem to realize the men were even there. The old pusher seemed to sense her nervousness and looked back at her.
"Whats with the gash?" Tommy waved her off and smiled at Ike.
"Its bring your kid to score day. Now, about my tubes?" The man resumed his blank stare.
"10 when I see it, 20 when the deal is done." Tommy drummed his fingers.
"Need a tube now, Ike." The man pulled a napkin off a cup of coffee and took a sip.
"Take a walk, you'll get one." Back outside a man approached Tommy and handed him a newspaper. They walked to a small alley and found an out of the way place. Tom pulled a small pencil case out of his suit pocket, inside was a syringe, a needle, alcohol, and a rubber tube. As he prepared the shot he tlked absently.
"If god made anything better, he kept it for himself." He pulled a tube from the newspaper and filled the syringe. He held the needle over his vest pocket and let a few drops fall into it.
"Old squirrels like me keep a stash in case we get busted. The lining here is stiff with junk." He began probing for a vein and Trista looked away.
"Addiction is an ugly thing. Some believe the origin of opiates is extreterrestrial. An alien substance that alters and changes our metabolism into that of another creature, one which subsists on opiates. This is the true face of addiction. Others think it originates from the dead world and the effects it has reflect a state similar to life after death. Contentment and emptiness are tennants of enlightenment after all." He hits a vein and a column of blood spurts into the vial.
"If you know how terrible it is, why not quit?" He pulls out the needle and takes a deep breath. He looks at her with a sad smile and says,
"It takes a lot of guts to kick a habit, kid."
They walked through the streets, Tommy telling Trista the history of the places they passed. They came to a storm drain just outside a vast neighborhood of abandoned houses. A sign said 'Sunset Acres' but was vandalized to read 'Toxic Acres'.
"The Toxic Acres. Once upon a time it had been prime real estate but the Ace Chemicals plant over yonder-" He motioned across an iridescent lake that fed into the Gotham river where an industrial complex sat dark and rusted like the bones of some blighted dragon. "Well they were churning out toxins and pollutants like an angry infection, having paid for the privilege. Even when people were losing hair by the handful and kids went blind, they still wouldn't quit. It wasn't until they dumped a load of arsenic into the river and a boy-scout troop had the misfortune of swimming in it. 24 dead kids is what it takes to lance a pimple like that. Ever since no one goes into that neighborhood without a full hazmat suit. Even the junkies and freaks steer clear of it. They say the houses there are pristine, all their stuff still there, windows unbroken, dishes on the tables. Every now and then a few desperate hobos will cover their faces with rags and make a run into one of the houses, like divers searching shipwrecks for sunken treasure." Trista looked at the eerily empty streets and the dead houses disappearing into the weeds and felt a chill. They went down the slanted concrete sides of the storm drain and came upon an old service tunnel entrance. There were various graffiti tags covering the walls and above the tunnel in red it said 'Tunnel of Loath'. Tommy threw out his arms and smiled.
"Welcome to the Tunnel of Loathe! Room for one more inside, as always." Inside was dark but lit by various lamps and lights of every kind. The inside of the tunnel seemed to go on forever and all around it was a vast complex of makeshift houses built out of scraps and trash. A few people milled about, pushing carts or carrying bags. They called out and waved to Tommy as they walked through. They came to a large circular area surrounded by trash, old washing machines gutted and empty, refrigerators with their doors cut off, an old piano with no keys and the paneling removed to expose the strings within. At the center was a perpetually burning fire within a large pit where several spits hung with unidentifiable meat speared at the ends, hissing and dripping. One of the men by the fire looked over and stood up.
"Tommy! You old bag of salt crackers!" The man held out his arms. He was a large man with a round boyish face, he wore a soiled flannel shirt and chino pants and a trucker had with a logo hidden behind years of dirt and time. Tommy grabbed the man in a bear hug.
"Lovable Lou! When did you sink back into this old town?" Lou looked at Trista with confusion.
"Brought me a live one, a writer, god help her. Come to pan for info on Clayface Lee." The man's confusion remained but he smiled at Trista and bowed slightly.
"Clayface Lee. Haven't heard that curse in years. You gonna cat nip the girl or shoot it straight?" Tommy laughed and shook his head.
"Christsakes, Lou! You know a winks as good as a nod to a blind bat." Trista looked at him, confused.
"Catnip?" Tommy shrugged.
"Catnip is used to con someone looking to score weed, since it looks and smells like it when it burns. Often passed on the naive or uninstructed. Now where were we?" Tommy removed his coat and hat and tossed them into an empty refrigerator.
"Ladies and gentlemen! Cunts and pricks! Come one come all and hear a tale that will take the wrinkles out of your scrotum and turn the hairs on your ass white with terror!" The few who had been sitting around the fire turned with interest and several emerged from their shanties to gather around. Tommy kicked an old rusted ice box over and hopped on top, standing like a perfomer on a stage. Lou went over to the ruined piano and picked up a pair of old chopsticks, tapping the strings to create a faint melodic tune.
"Tonight we hear the story of Clayface Lee, the exterminator. Before we begin, let us say the junkie prayer." He put his hand over his heart and looked down solemnly. Trista found a place to sit and got out her recorder.
"Dearly Begrudged." He began.
"We are gathered here today in the valley of rape and despair to witness and join these two in the irrevocable shackles of chemical matrimony. Junk abundantly blesses the habit that binds you through its hypodermic sacrament, it debases and diminishes those it has already consecrated by chemical baptism." He pauses and the others all say in unison, "
Wouldn't you?"
"Do you take this junk to be your habit, to need and to hoard, in good times and in bad, in sickness or on the nod, for richer or poorer, for all the days of your life till death do you become cured?" Again he pauses and the others smile and say,
"Wouldn't you?" He places his hand on his chest, the other behind his back and gives a neat bow.
"Then by the power vested in me by the state of my mental degradation, I now pronounce you Junkie and Habit. You may kiss the sky." They all clap and shout approval as Tommy bows graciously, like a conductor.
"Now then, before we get to the matter at hand, let us first set the scene. Gotham City, ladies and gentlmen."
4
.An Ode to Gotham City
Welcome to Gotham. The city of cold fire. The town with no cheer. Where the bat's teeth marks are on the sky, like a black clay tarp thrown over the world, the smell of atrophied gangsters and diesel hits you like an earthbound ghost, follows you at North and Barr Town, The Bowery, Robinson Park, the panhandler of dreams, the conman past invading and hustling the naive present for a future it was only ever promised. Into the East End where broken dreams litter the streets like dead birds and the steam comes out of the grills like the whole goddamned town is ready to blow. Into the Narrows, where the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos and every building squats in the smog, covered in TV antennas like the sensitive, erectile, black feelers of some vast and inscrutable insect, waiting for some form of stimulation from the silent and meaningless sky. In life-proof houses, the people prostrate themselves before their television shrine, basking in the warmth of better times and better people. And the Gotham City drag hits you like no other drag in the world, worse than high mountain towns where the air is thin like death in the throat. There is no drag like Gotham City drag. You can't see it, you don't know where it comes from. But its there. The Gotham City drag is waiting like a junk pusher at every corner, behind the black two-way mirror windows, and in the cocktail lounges at the end of every subdivision street (every block in Gotham has its own bar, liquor store, church and paycheck advance hustler. Let us not forget the only free cheddar to be found in Gotham is in the mouse trap, my friends. Its the best deal in town.) It hides in the stairwell, it hangs in the curtain, and it sleeps in your hat. Only the young bring anything in, brought here by bad directions or born here after a bad spin on the parental lottery wheel of fortune, and they are not young very long. And the clock-tower ticks out like a dripping faucet until you're full of rag water, bitters, and blue ruin. And you spill out over the side to anyone who'll listen. And if you can't score for a sympathetic ear,E you'll end up running through empty auto-mats and subway stations, chasing the shadow of your child self and screaming "Come back, Kid! Come back!" and follow your boy right into the Gotham river, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete and pistols pounded flat to avoid the probing fingers of ballistic experts. Beyond the river lies the bloodless frontier, Slaughter Swamp, where even the dead will get up and drag themselves out for fear of being alone there after dark. Out through the iridescent, acidic lakes and miasmic, brown lagoons where alligators crawl around in broken glass and tin cans and aquatic black centipedes, some say reach up to six feet in length, move unseen through the sucking black slime only emerging on the bone white tussocks of dead wood to belch out poisonous methane in long gibbering whines that sound like the death screams of a rabbit.
The legends of the dead returning from the swamp date back to the Indians but no one has ever attempted to uncover the reason or harness its power other than nameless inbred cults and forgotten, doomed pioneers. The only one history remembers was Raj Abdul, the mad Arab, who supposedly derived an elixir from the swamp that could relapse a person who'd taken the death cure. But no one ever came back sane and rational. They all ran screaming for the nearest cemetery, killing anyone in between. One or two are rumored to be beating their heads against the padded walls of an Arkham cell to this day. As for the mad Arab himself, they say he was carried off into that swamp by a baying pack of the souls he relapsed from death and no one ever saw him again, alive or dead. As for the origin of such horrors, only myth offers a glimpse.
Gotham is not a young land. It is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there, waiting. It was said that on the seventh day God did rest. And as the withdrawal symptoms from his six day creation bender began to take hold he found himself in the land we now know as America. There, coughing and sweating in the junk-sick morning, he came upon the place we now know as Gotham City and proceeded to squat down on old bones and give birth to a great, inscrutable turd, black with the blood of internal hemorrhaging and organ failure. And where that turd landed, green valleys blackened into wastelands and rivers silted up and turned to oozing marshes where nothing grew, not even a mandrake. It was in that blighted, secret place that even the Indians knew to steer clear of, that the founding settlers of Gotham City, a group of Norwegian misfits led by a mercenary of ill repute, came upon the land they were promised would be a virginal paradise. What they found was a septic and gangrenous wound gouged into the earth where the only things that thrived were poisonous, invasive, dangerous, or desperate. Well those settlers, delirious with fatigue or swamp gas, were determined to make a heaven of this hell and built a town which carried on the reprehensible reputation of the swamp it was built upon to this very day.
As for God, well they say, after successfully kicking his creation habit, came back only once, took one look at us and ran screaming back to the void beyond where he took a three gain shot and died of an overdose of time and a cold turkey withdrawal of breath, leaving the world he created in the throws of his addiction behind to drift through the silent dark until the Man finally comes along to shut off the heat for the non-payment. The only one to notice was an old German on a mountain somewhere, but the people just chalked it up to the syphilis eating holes in his brain like a secretive cupboard rat, and went on believing whatever was convenient at the time. But I digress, as usual.
The city changed hands as often as any American town and each was as corrupt and deplorable as the previous. First the Norwegians, then the British, then the Americans, there was even a bizarre period when its certifiably insane proprietor claimed it belonged to the republic of Tunisia to avoid bothersome restrictions imposed by the US government upon which its citizens eventually declared war and brought about the epic massacre of 1806, the death toll of which has yet to be surpassed. Crime took to Gotham like cancer to a prostate from the very first days of its inception and no other city in the first world can boast a record of corruption, scandal, deprivation, or despair that compares to the sorted histories of crime and atrocity Gotham City claims. There are only three rules in Gotham; 1. Never give anything away for free. 2. Never give more than you have to give(always keep them hungry and always make them wait) 3. Always take everything back if you possibly can. Gotham does not sell its evil to its citizens, it sells its citizens to its evil. It does not improve and simplify itself, it degrades and simplifies its citizens. There are no tourists in Gotham. Every road into Gotham is a one way street. You can't go back, you can only go deeper.
Gotham has always had bats in its belfry and crocs in its sewers. Optimism in Gotham is profane and quantitative like money. The virus of need has infected Gotham from the moment one small step for man came upon its blighted surface. The face of evil is always the face of "total need". The unspoken motto of Gotham City is, "Wouldn't you?". Yes, you would. You would lie, cheat, sell out your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy that viral Gotham City need. A every citizen of Gotham is in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in any position to act in any other way, just as a rabid dog cannot choose but bite. They say misery loves company, but in Gotham misery needs company. We'll take your charity, your optimism, your selflessness, and your sacrifice any way we can get it. We don't deserve it, but we need it. And when you've nothing left to offer we'll take your hate, your pessimism, your pettiness, and your self-righteousness any way you'll give it. We don't need it, but we deserve it. And when its all drained away and all that's left is an empty shell of apathy and nihilism, we wait and watch as the virus of need takes hold and you become a true citizen. Wouldn't you?
Welcome to Gotham. Room for one more.
I wasn't born in Gotham but the world network of junkies lead me to it, just like marajuana leads to heroin. I thought I could take those junk bullets and leave em, save a few for my bad days. Well, we all have those bad days where we can't win for shit. And the more you use em, the more bad days you have without em. Then it comes down to all your days being bad without the bullets. Then its time to stop messin around and kiddin yourself. Kid, you're hooked. Heavy as lead. That's how I found myself in Gotham. It wasn't long before I graduated with honors from the University of Gotham City Addiction with a masters in the Algebra of Need, minor in LGBT studies. I wasn't the youngest graduate but I was the top of my class.
Now the stories and legends of Gotham were enough to fill a library with smut that could make the pope die of shame on the spot. But the one that stands out for me is the story of Brad Lee, Clayface. He got that name because his skin tone was a stone grey of black under white, the kind you sometimes see in mixed races. He had a face which was unremarkable and instantly forgettable. After meeting him you couldn't be sure he had a face at all. He would walk around humming a tune and the people around him would take it up. He was so spectral, gray and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own minds humming the tune. Anytime a song would come into your head for no reason you knew Clayface had come around. Brad Clayface Lee was the best narcotics agent in the industry. He could walk up to any pusher in Gotham and score direct and the pusher wouldn't remember him afterward. Not only that, he was a hardcore dope fiend who would cook up and fix right in front of the pusher before pulling his badge. He was whats called an exterminator. If some new pusher was making trouble, or if an organization fell behind on payments to the GCPD, they send Lee the exterminator to bust their pushers.
I was working with the Shakeman when I remember hearing about it. We was workin the marks out in Robinson Park when word came around that Clayface Lee tried to bust a pusher for the Joker's crew. Anybody who knows anything knows you don't cross the Joker. Crossing him is like crossing a landmine. Well the word was Clayface Lee was getting fixed up with a hot shot. Knowing the Joker, it wouldn't be a simple shot of strycnine, that's no fun for him. He put some devil's cocktail in the tube and rigged his room with a one way whore house mirror and charged a Hamilton to watch. I decided to see for myself and the Shakeman came along. I had seen a hot shot before but this was something else. There were a few others there, a few of Joker's crew, and the man himself. He stood at the back, his face streaked up with that grease paint we wears like war paint and his eyes glowing like the pilot light of a stove waiting for the gas. Just being in the room with him made you nervous, like being in the room with a wild animal. The Shakeman asked him what was in the hot shot. The Joker just gave him a rotten toothed smile and pointed to Lee who was taking the shot. The look on his face when it hit, kid it was tasty. He jerked and spasmed, foam flying from his mouth, spattering the mirror, his back arched until it snapped, we could hear it crackle even through the glass. His pants darkened at the crotch and shit dribbled out around his ankles. Even with his spine snapped he flailed and jumped across the room, throwing blood and snot and feces all over the walls. He had a look of absolute horror on his face and stopped only a moment to look at us through the mirror before bashing his head against it, sending a network of cracks that turned the window almost opaque. He reeled back with impossible strength and bashed his head again and again, leaving blood and scalp stuck to the glass shards and seeping through to our side. He finally fell dead after brains started bubbling out of his ears and everything was dead quiet. At a loss for words, my mouth hanging open. One of the Joker's crew said, "Cool." And everyone else seemed to let go of their breath at once. The Joker just smiled. They dragged him to the river and tossed him in, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete and pistols pounded flat to avoid the probing fingers of bottom feeding ballistic experts.
No one can say for sure when Clayface Lee came back, since he never left any kind of impression where ever he went. A cop told me he'd reappeared about a week after the hot shot. Just showed up for work like always, having no idea what had happened to him. They put him back on the beat and chalked it up to dumb luck he survived. Then they noticed the changes in him. He could get a fix just by rubbing against a junkie on the nod, like a contact high. He started paying the younger junkies to let him rub up agaisnt them. One of them, this elitist fairy called himself Freddy Flowers, said he would strip naked and hold him, making himself soft like jelly until he had completely surrounded the poor kid. When he was done the kid was covered in this milky slime like rancid jism. His habit started to jump geometric. Soon he needed a recharge every half hour. He began cruising the precincts and bribing the Hack on duty to let him in a cell full of junkies. No amount of contact seemed to fix him and his odd behavior finally got him called into the District Supervisor of Narcotics office. He went in alone but one of the narcs stuck a bug under the desk so they could listen in.
"Bradley your conduct has given rise to rumors, and I hope for your sake they are no more than that, being so unspeakably distasteful." Papers rustle. "Good lord man….hrumpf. The department must be above suspicion, certainly above such suspicions as you have seemingly aroused. You are lowering the entire tone of the industry. We are prepared to accept your immediate resignation." A thud can be heard like knees hitting carpet. "No, boss, no! The department is my very lifeline!" Shuffling sounds of knees on carpet. "I'll do anything, boss! Anything!" The low thunder of office chair wheels can be heard. "Really this is most distasteful! Have you no pride! I must say I feel a distinct revulsion. I mean there is something…well…rotten about you and you smell like a compost heap! I must ask you to leave this office at once!" More shuffling of knees and the squeak of a great weight leaving an old chair. "I'll wipe your ass! I'll wash out your dirty condoms! I'll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose!" A muffled wretch followed by undecernable paniked words said through a coat sleeve. Silence. "No! NO!" A sound like a wet mop being dunked into a bucket. Silence.
Thirty minutes later they come in to check on them and Clayface Lee was sitting in the DSN's chair, high as a kite. He looked like he'd gained 40 pounds and his face was grey as ashes. The DSN disappeared without a trace. They kept Lee in the detox tank overnight but they couldn't find any trace of the DSN and had nothing to hold him with, so they let Clayface go. Terror swept the Gotham underworld. Junkies and agents disappeared. A group of whores in a brothel saw him ooze up to a client and envelop him. They said he gave off a thin mist that seemed to anesthetize them so they could only watch as he absorbed the john. The heat was on for Lee. The cops wanted him, the pushers wanted him, there wasn't a man woman or child in Gotham who wouldn't put a bullet in Clayface Lee if given the chance, yet he seemed to move unseen through the streets and alleys. The only time I saw him was when I went to score off Wrong-way Carl on the East End. Moving through the junk world is like being in a dream. One minute you're scoring off an old time shmeker, the next you're staring at a plate of eggs answering questions asked by a lesbian trombone player with a mohawk and a hundred rings in her ears, the next you're naked and looking for a lost cat in a back alley for some friend you can't recall the name of. Like in dreams, the transitions between these various lives and events is seamless and unnoticeable. You only become aware of the absurdity of it when you wake up, only instead of waking up in your bed, you wake up in the dream itself and realize it isn't a dream at all. Sometimes it's a dream you wake up in, like finding yourself at a party with strangers, and other times it's a nightmare you wake up into.
I came out of the junk haze I was in a dark room with black curtains over the windows and a soiled matress in the corner. A junkie was passed out half on the matress, half on the floor. Behind a door I could hear muffled conversation and quiet jazz music. The smell of weed smoke and sweat hung in the air. As my eyes adjusted to the dark I could see someone else sitting in the corner, rocking back and forth like a junkie with the shakes. Memories while on junk are like events experienced through the front brain alone. Flat statements of external events with no emotional conotation or nostalgia. I remembered following the junk trail to a pimp pusher called Baby Shoes. He was a ritual weed smoker and very puritanical about junk, the way some tea heads are. He had a flat nose and little red eyes that lit up whenever he looked at a chick, and went out whenever he looked at anything else. Baby Shoes had put down a con on the streets offering the cheapest junk in town. Junkies lined up around the block to meet with him and I had come in on the junk beam to see for myself what he was selling. He had come across Clayface Lee and managed to lock him in a back room somewhere. He noticed the narcotic effect Lee had on people and started charging by the hour for junkies to share a room with him. If he noticed the junkies disappearing now and then, he didn't care. I paid for my hour and sat for an unknown period of time before coming off the nod and realizing where I was. I took a moment to orient myself and stood on stiff legs. When I moved it seemed to notice me there. It spoke with a gutteral flatulent voice like bubbling ooze, a sound that hit you right in the guts and made you feel like you had to drop trou.
"Lost…..have no…no idea….can't….can't remember…..anymore." I stepped to the side and pulled the curtain back enough to see. When the light touched him his skin retracted and tightened and his eyes seemed to float into his sockets from somewhere deep inside. He looked at me and I felt bugs under my skin.
"Losing." It gurgled.
"Losing….myself….Brad…..Lee…..name…name is."
"Clayface Lee?" I asked, more to confirm to myself. A look of recognition flashed into his eyes and his features became sharper.
"Lee! Name Lee…..agent….." He began to list numbers that might have been a badge number.
"Fix." It muttered and looked down at the passed out junkie. It reached out with a long blob of protoplasm, feeling for the junkie like a blind bottom feeder.
"Jesus, Lee." I said without hearing myself and the feeler retracted slightly. He looked up into my eyes and I saw desperation there like a cornered animal, then the feeler touched the junkie and the eyes went cold and they had no more life in them than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk. A comotion from the hall brought things back into focus and I heard the familiar shouting of orders that meant the fuzz had busted the place. Lee noticed it too and pulled the junkie toward him and other protoplasmic feelers emerged, drawing him up like the legs of a spider, pushing him into a huge gaping maw that had opened in its abdomen. Thudding boots from the hall and bangs of doors being kicked in followed by shouts of 'clear'. Animal reactions slowed time, giving me a moment to decide. Out the window and down to the street. If I was on the thrid or fourth floor I was as good as dead but there were worse things than dying and one of them was spending even one more second in the room with that thing. I turned in time to see the cops kick in the door, flooding the room with light and causing Lee to reel back and shreek like a wounded bat. It had dropped all pretense of human form and leapt into a writhig mass of flesh, mouths full of transparent teeth, rectums opening and defecating, phallic organs rising and joining together like sinew. I was a falling black star, a glittering tail of glass behind me, in a low arc to the street below as the firecracker pops of gunfire errupted from the ruined window that looked like a obsene mouth full of broken glass teeth. I picked myself up wrapped in a black curtain robe with a curtain rod staff, hobbling on a broken ankle and a few cracked ribs and started west.
I thought the fuzz might have nailed him then but a few months later the word came around that Clayface was making a name for himself as a pusher in the underground. He had holed himself up in a chamber deep in the Gotham tunnels and was pushing the purest junk in town. Whats more he was giving it out for free, breaking one of the tenants of junk pushers. You tell junkies where to score for free and you'll never see the end of the line headed your way. Word came around what the real deal was. If you find him deep underground, as soon as you enter his presence the nod comes on you and it don't let up. The chamber he sits in like an aztec god was already packed to the ceiling with junkies of every variety sitting in silence. They drank the piss that pooled in the center of the chamber and ate the junkies who'd taken the death cure. Clayface would just sit at the center, giving off clouds of junk. Some of the older ones who can't fix on the gas crawl over to the multitude of errect penis' at the base of the creature, sucking out the white fluid within like piglets at a mother sow. The only time he is roused to action is when his own junk starts to run low. When this occurs the whole chamber becomes a frenzy of activity. Clayface gives off an aphrodeziac pheromone that sends the chamber into a vicious orgy. Junkies pile on one another or approach the quivering mass of Clayface who sprouts sex organs of every variety to fuck and/or be fucked for hours on end. When this baccinalia ends the junk comes back and they all settle into their own spilled jism and feces to drift into the void of junk. There is always more than a few junkies missing after each of these, allowing room for the patient multitude outside to join. Clayface began to take on religious significance in the junkie world. Being in his presence was the junkie nirvana and many of his believers eagerly anticipated the day they would be absorbed into their living god to become one with all. Liquifactionism became the religion of choice for junkies all over Gotham.
When the Batman came for him at last, he had to fight through an army of rabid junkies just to get to him. When he finally got to him, Clayface had grown to an enormous size and, detecting the danger presented by the Bat, released a gas that drove everyone within range into a murderous rage. No one knows how he did it, but he had reduced Clayface to a size that could be transported and they hauled him off to the funny farm to fume in an airtight tank to this very day.
Just another day in Gotham.
Son cosas de la vida.
5
When he finished his tale, the others all talked among themselves and shook their heads, eyes wide with paranoia. The sun was setting, based on the blood orange color of the light filtering down through the grid iron opening at the top of the shaft they were in. Tommy hopped down from the ice box and tossed a cigarette like he was flipping a coin, catching it in his mouth effortlessly and popping a match alit with his thumb nail. He took a puff and grinned at Trista. He was the most interesting man she had ever met. The others had began filing toward the large crowd gathering at the opening of the tunnel. Trista looked after them.
"What are they doing?" Tommy took a puff and snorted the smoke out of his nose in a long sigh.
"Its Joker's night. We have to barricade the tunnel as best we can." Trista cocked her head.
"Joker's Night?" Tommy shook his head and took anouther drag.
"A tradition here in Gotham, comemorating the theatrical debut of the clown prince of crime. Every year, young hoodlums and burgeoning killers take to the streets and cause as much chaos as they can. Murder, rape, arson, assaults, anything to make a name for themselves and stick it to the man. Some of them are wanna-be Jokers, others do as a kind of offering to the man himself so that maybe if word gets to him about it, he might exclude them from the next crime wave he starts, or even offers them a cut in. Mostly its just a chance for people to be the evil little shits they really are for a night. Like Halloween for crooks." He finished of the smoke and crushed it out against his shoe, tucking the butt into a vest pocket.
"Last year someone tossed a molotov cocktail over the barrier down here and killed 4 folks. A couple years before that they dropped a live grenade down a man hole, blasting a dozen people and killing dozens more when the water main ruptured and flooded out most of the tunnel. No one goes out on Joker's Night unless they aim to take the death cure. They rushed the Gotham Art Museum and threw acid in the faces of priceless portraits, they rupture sewer mains with air hammers outside cafes, they turn into a Viking raiding party and rape, pillage, and burn whole streets." Trista shook her head with disbelief.
"Don't the police do anything, or the Batman?" Tom laughed without much humor.
"Most of the mayhem goes on in the poorer parts of town. They crack down on the business districts and high class joints, but they don't have the time or the care to come down here. Everyone has different priorities. Mostly what they do is bust the ones they nab twice as hard as a deterrent for the rest, but if you're out on Joker's Night you can't have a lot of stock invested in your future holdings, savvy? Son cosas de la vida." Trista looked at the people carrying furniture and setting up scrap wood walls.
"You keep using that phrase. What's it mean?" Tommy stood next to her and watched the homeless work.
"It's a spanish phrase I picked up in Mexico City. It means, 'That's just the way life is.'. All we can do is keep doing." Trista watched them, building a dam against a cruel and indifferent world, and she asked if she could have one of those cigarettes. Tommy chuckled and fished a crumpled smoke out of his jacket pocket, written on the side of the cigarette in black ink were the words 'Never Knows Best'. Trista looked at it a moment before putting it in her mouth and cupping her hands around the match Tom had struck for her.
"My sister used to say that all the time. You kind of remind me of her. She was one of those crumbling beauties with a razor sadness that only got worse with he clang and the thunder of the southern pacific going by. There was nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars wouldn't fix but she never wanted anything to do with anyone, man or woman. Last I heard she went into a mushroom cult and disappeared. Just another ghost in the city of the dead." He looked up and there was pain in his face, like the pain only the old understand.
"Well its getting late and I wouldn't feel right sending you out into the streets without an escort. What do you say I walk you home, or the equivalent?" Trista smiled and exhaled smoke to one side of her mouth.
"Such a gentleman." Tommy bowed dramatically and they squeezed through the barrier and into the drain way outside.
The sky above was a flaming red through the clouds, like a scene straight out of revelations. Businesses were closing early, people stuck in cars trying to get home like fleeing refugees from a war torn country. As they walked, Trista asked him about Gotham, about the Batman and what his take on all of it was.
"Ah yes, Gotham's guardian strangel. The dark knight. The vigilante. Gotham City is like a deep sea angler fish, dangling the alluring light of need to attract the best and brightest. This city goes through heroes like a junkie goes through junk. The more it uses them up, the less it has; and the more it has, the more it uses them up. We need heroes but we don't deserve them. Just look at the violent reaction this city had to the bat. Like an immune system creating antibodies, this city created monsters to combat this new threat to the status quo. Now we have alligators in our sewers, clowns in the basements, witches and goblins lurking in our broom closets. The bat stepped in the same Gotham tar we all do and it sucked him down to hold him here, to digest him and spit out the bones. The Batman is here to stay, whether he likes it or not, and the freaks like Joker and Scarecrow are what will keep him here." Trista wished she'd had her recorder on but just tried to commit what he said to memory.
"What about the Joker? You said you met him? What is he like?" Tom smiled, flashing his gold teeth that seemed like burning embers in the evening light.
"The Joker is what we'd all be if we let Gotham into our hearts. He is an agent of madness, the crawling chaos. He isn't the devil, he is who the devil has to check under his bed for every night. He is the only complete man in Gotham, except for the Batman." Tom adjusted his hat and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger before spitting through the hole.
"I remember back before he was a household name, he reserved a table at the fanciest place in Gotham, Ché Colbert. Had to book it a year in advance. This place was so high class and distinctive they could serve literal garbage for food and no one would say a word, even while they were quietly dying of botulism. The owner and chef of Ché Colbert was Francis Colbert, a cruel and exacting tyrant who regularly reduced his staff to tears or suicide. His cuisine was considered the finest in the world and those fortunate enough to consume it had to do so under the cold, scrutinizing gaze of Colbert as he paced the dining area, making sure the guests had proper appreciation in their eyes. So Joker shows up in clown paint and a bright purple suit with an enormous stove pipe hat and an entourage of circus freaks in evening wear. The maitre'd was frozen with terror and could only stand by as the Joker seated himself and his party at a table. When Colbert in all his gourmand majesty passed by to scrutinize the obscene clientele, the Joker looks up from his plate and motions to one of the freaks, who proceeds to pull out and toss a bottle of ketchup to him. He then douses the cuisine and slurps a great handful, giving Colbert a jolly thumbs up. 30 gourmets stop chewing at once. You could have heard a soufflé drop. Colbert lets out a bellow of rage like a wounded bear and runs to the kitchen to arm himself with a meat cleaver. The maitre'd snarls like a vicious baboon, his face purple with anger. The saucier grabs a boning knife and leaps over the counter like a trained gymnast. They chase the Joker through the dining room with murderous intent, knocking over tables, vintage wine and matchless food crash to the floor, the Joker's shrill laughter cutting the air like the slashes of a rapier. Cries of 'Lynch him!' ring out and a gourmet in a tuxedo begins fashioning a hangman's noose from a silk curtain rope. Finding himself in imminent danger of death or dismemberment, the Joker plays his trump card. He throws back his head and lets out hog call and a hundred famished pigs he had stationed nearby rush into the restaurant, slopping the cuisine. Like a great tree, Colbert falls to the floor of a stroke where he is eaten by the pigs. The people evacuate the restaurant in a panic, as the police surround the building and the Joker slips into the night, hooting and cackling."
They reach the street where Trista's hotel was and she looked at the setting sun, now a thin line of orange under a deep ocean sky barely visible through the fog. Tom took a drag and looked into an alley as they passed.
"Aw hell." He muttered as he turned toward the alley. At the far end there were three or four men standing around someone tied to a chain-link fence. Trista could see the bright orange of a fire between the shadowy figures and it became clear what was happening. Trista felt her stomach twist and she let out a small gasp. Tom was walking toward them and shouting.
"Hey now! Let that poor sap go! Go on now!" The men turned to them, their faces looking like grinning demons in the firelight. The fire was growing between the man's legs and his soiled pants were beginning to smoke, yet he didn't seem to notice. He just hung there with a blank expression like the man on the subway. The men laughed and shouted a few obscenities at us before deciding we wouldn't be any fun and took off down another back alley, hooting and overturning garbage cans as they went. Tom trotted over and stamped the fire out. Trista looked closer at the man who only stared with dead end eyes. There were headphones in his ears leading to a phone in his pocket but when Trista pulled one out the end looked strange.
"He's an IND. Irreversible neural damage. Over liberated, you might say." Trista looked at the device at the end of the wire.
"What is this?" Tommy looked at it and shook his head.
"A new trend in the junk world. Electrodes that can be plugged into any phone or mobile device and used to stimulate different areas of the brain for euphoric or pain-relieving effect." Trista looked at the electrode and shook her head.
"How is that possible?" Tom shrugged and sighed.
"Same way opiates or hallucinogens do it. Stimulating neural connections to release chemicals in the brain. Whether you absorb it through the blood, the mucus membranes, or put a few volts through the right channels, the result is the same; addiction. This is the future of addiction and you can see the results." He begins to loosen the man's bonds, causing one arm to flop down.
"Neural connections wear out, like veins will, but a vein will come back in time and through a process of rotation, a junkie can keep his habit going for a long time. But neural connections don't come back, and when the addict runs out of brain cells he is in a terrible fucking position." The man was slumped over now, staring at his blistered feet.
"They turn up the juice or try new areas of contact but they all wear out and all that's left is a lump of clay for a brain." Trista looked away as a dark stain spread between the man's legs.
"Do they ever come back?" Tom stood and tilted his hat back.
"They don't come back, won't come back, once they're gone…" He moves his hand through the air like a leaf on the wind. Trista pulled the electrodes until a phone pulled free of the man's pocket. She looked at the electrodes, the Zenon brand was on the wire. She looked at the phone, which was filthy and neglected. The app that was open was something called ECT unlimited. She dialed 911 and told them to send an ambulance to their location. She was told it might be a while, tonight is a busy night for hospitals. She thanked them and hung up, putting the phone into her pocket. Tom looked at her sideways with a fox's grin.
"You gonna lift that poor sap's phone?" He make a tsk tsk sound and wagged a finger. Trista smirked.
"Just for research. I'll send it to Gotham General when I'm through." Tom shrugged and they headed back toward the hotel.
The street lights buzzed to light and already the air was filled with the distant howls of emergency vehicles. At the hotel entrance Tom lit another smoke and stood with his hands in his jacket pockets.
"Well, I guess this is good bye. I had a lovely evening." He held out his hand like a gentlemen and Trista smiled, putting her hand on his. He kissed her hand gently and took off his hat, holding it against his chest.
"Will you be okay walking back? I can call you a cab." Tommy chuckled and tilted the cigarette up at an angle in his teeth.
"You know what they called me back in Mexico City? El hombré invisiblé. The invisible man. I walk between the rain drops, in and out of people's lives like a dream you only remember when you have it again. Mad as a hatter, thin as a dime, Ol' Tommy Wades takes nothing but time." Trista laughed and handed him a card and some cash.
"Give me a call if you want an exposé, this is for the rights to your story. Call it an advance." Tommy held up his hands defensivly.
"I simply couldn't, my dear." He lifted his hat and as it passed her hand the money and card vanished. He twirled the hat and placed it neatly on his head, giving Trista a wink. Trista watched him saunter down the street with that strange walk of his. She could hear him faintly singing a song about a downtown train as he passed under the rusty orange street lights.