CHAPTER 5: DREAMS
The Joker shuts the door and stands just outside it, waiting while holding his breath. Finally, he hears what he's been waiting for, the faint sobbing of Martha Aiken. He grins. Another fantastic performance. He suddenly feels entitled to an award of some kind, and dances happily up the stairwell and in to the corridor.
He had done it on a whim – brought the bag to Martha for the sheer thrill of it, and also, partially to see her reactions. She had kept most of them masterfully hidden, and he admits even now that he had not been entirely sure what she had been thinking for some of the charade. But either way, he had gotten the response he'd wanted, and recalling how she looked in his makeup he is happy.
He believes in keeping people like Martha Aiken on their toes and constantly wondering – always trying to figure out what about him is plausible and what is ploy. He has a million different stories to tell people like her, because, after all, if he is going to have a past he prefers it to be multiple choice.
He feels replenished from the deception.
He thinks on it for a moment and supposes she reacted as well as he would have expected your typical control freak to react to somebody like himself, coming in and throwing a wrench in between the pleasantly grinding gears of their tranquil little life. But it was becoming too much of a business relationship. The kidnapping, the captivity, the constant daily questioning. He had had the sneaking suspicion she would eventually get used to him, that that was what had happened, to a small degree. That a routine had begun to formulate. The thought of it depresses him. He hates it when people think they can predict him. He will need to keep upping the level with her, and considers that their relationship it is not unlike a chess game now. He realizes, with a surge of excitement, that he will need to keep making increasingly more outrageous moves just to keep her from correctly guessing the angle he is really playing. Who knew she would be such an exhilarating guest.
The makeup was the first attempt to beat her back down into submission, to prove she would never be able to fully anticipate him. Her captivity, his frenzied behavior. Somewhere in the back of his head he had felt it was really and truly necessary to give her a reason for all of it. He's sure part of it will put her mind at ease, the knowledge will make her feel as though she has regained a very small amount of control, that much he knows. But he's also sure that part of it will make him more of an enigma to her than ever, that even though she has a slight amount of control back he is still a thunderstorm without a forecast. And now the thing is done and his heart pumps quickly as he makes his way to his room. He is alive with new-found energy. He swims in the lies and they relax him, they give him strength in the same way a man swims the English channel and feels invigorated and invincible afterward. If nobody knows who and what he really is, then he is a legend, and legends are revered.
He goes to open a door covered with graffiti and permanent marker, all of which state, in more ways than one, that this is his room and thus should not be entered into without his expressed permission.
His room, once the office of the manager, is plain, barren, almost entirely devoid of furniture save for a single bureau, one lamp and a cot in the back corner. His men sleep more comfortably than he does, although it's a little known fact that The Joker never sleeps. His mind is constantly alert, ready, the way the gears of a clock continue to tick on faithfully hour after hour after hour. On occasion, however, he does rest. He seldom dreams good dreams, but he prefers the nightmares because they always give him such deliciously inventive ideas to experiment with in the waking world.
The walls of his room are stripped of wallpaper, and there are stains on the floor that outline the positions of the furniture that used to occupy it. Mold grows on the gray bricks. The room has the feeling of an abandoned doctor's office or crematorium, and he feels instantly at ease as he closes and locks the large, wooden door behind himself.
This room is the precise opposite of the one given to Martha Aiken, but both rooms represent separate halves of his personality. Martha sees the manic side, the part that organizes, that imagines and creates. Only he sees this room, his room, a representation of his true self. Empty, save for one or two necessary items, a portable radio included, and an odd mixture of filth and cold sterility.
He bounds across the room like a rabbit and crashes onto the cot, face upturned to the ceiling. A small arsenal of weapons are hidden under the sagging mattress, and a notebook and pen lay hidden under his pillow. He withdraws the pen and notebook and begins to write, scribbling chicken scratch for the rest of the night to the sound of heavy classical music. Notes mostly pertaining to his master plan, like he's keeping a diary of the entire experience for no reason other than to occupy himself in between the anarchy. He writes briefly about Martha, and how she proves that chaos is necessary. He has always believed that it is; in religion, in mathematics, in science, in politics, in crime, in brain waves and heart rhythms, even in the infinite blackness of starry space. He might argue that the Big Bang (if there had been such a delightfully imaginative thing) was a result of random chaos. He spends a time musing on how a growing body of research shows that too much order in intimate relationship systems is a bad thing. That rigid and predictable social interactions in families, for instance, leads to psychopathology over time.
He stops dead and starts to laugh madly.
The result of too much order in life is depression, anxiety, and conduct disorders.
Hilarious.
And what's better is that in a way, it makes sense. Too much order being traumatic. It reminds him of himself, of his own life and family.
After a while the bout of laughter dies away. The footsteps of passersby, his men wandering the halls respectively, echo through his door. He ignores them and returns to writing, bringing it back around to Martha Aiken and how people like her fail to recognize that this needed chaos is, in fact, good.
"It's good because it takes us away from a pattern – a pattern which would inevitably get boring." He muses aloud as he writes, putting on his best imitation of a lecturing professor while swinging his legs over the edge of his cot like a sulking teenager. "Chaos gives life flavor and unpredictability, and like I said before, it gives order a purpose. After all, order can't exist without chaos. What would be the point?"
He sits up and places his back to the wall in an effort to reach a more comfortable writing position.
"While I'm sure there are those who would never believe me –" here he pauses and devotes an entire page of his notebook to a sketch of the Batman, "– it is my personal belief that Gotham could emerge to a more complex, orderly state by moving through a period of chaos, like a nice refreshing dip in the chaotic pool. Chaos has the splendid ability to rejuvenate that kind of a system. Now, it's true that I could be lazy and let the mobsters serve as the element of chaos in Gotham. Lord knows they've been causing enough trouble as of late – but I'm not the kind of man to stand by and watch something executed poorly when I'll fully capable of pulling it all off it in a much more organized, artistic fashion."
He grimaces at the thought of his so-called competition. Too many criminals make it all about the money. He knows full well that the superior criminal realizes that money burns. Doing something for the sake of accumulating wealth is a worthless waste of time. Money gained is money stolen or lost or spent on useless commodities. So much more destruction can be accomplished with the same amount of effort, and the effects actually last. For example, his tastes are simplistic and cheap, ranging from the delightful bang of gunpowder lit alight, to dynamite set in just the right area of an underground parking garage to topple the whole building. Wrecked rubble, red blood running.
His thoughts center on Martha's weak sobbing and the memory of her face covered in his makeup. He shivers involuntarily (how surprising) and quickly clears his head, taking a moment to center himself. He finishes writing, promising himself and his notebook that Gotham will not be the same once he's had his way with it.
Wait 'til they get a load of me . . .
A quick note on nightmares.
They have the nasty habit of appearing disguised at first as good dreams. And what's worse, the ones that start out this way – calm, pleasant, warm and enticing and providing the dreamer with such a strong feeling of safety – they always seem so real.
Such is the case with Martha's nightmare. It is jumbled, an echo of reality that when remembered in the morning will seem dull and faded, but at the time it's being perceived is sharp and clear and lifelike. And safe. Safe until the walls of her home (how she's missed them, familiar and safe) begin to melt away to reveal the stained and tattered wallpaper of the delicatessen corridors. Safe until the television screen (Gotham nightly news, on at 8 o'clock eastern/central time) in her bedroom bursts abruptly into uncontrollable flames. Safe until her bed (soft, inviting, delightful) becomes jelly, and she starts to sink into it, screaming without a voice for somebody, anybody to come and save her. She tries to claw her way up and out of the pit, darkness envelops her, but there's just enough light for her to clearly make out the scars on her wrists. Only they're bleeding again. They're no longer scars, but wide open wounds gushing blood in thick dark waves, like her whole body is draining out in one long go.
She screams, long horrible howls up into the blackness.
She's starting to fall.
Help me please god why does nobody hear me why does nobody HELP ME!
And then . . . a hand. Stretched out, reaching, pulling her up out of the void. Pulling her into the safety of a tight embrace.
She clings to the blackened silhouette of her savior. She hugs and presses her face in to the fabric of his shirt, and smells that familiar scent of cologne mixed with some bazaar, rotting stench. Her relief lasts only seconds, because when she looks up she is horrified to see his ghostly grin and dead eyes staring back at her, hollow. He leans in, time seems to stop as his lips part while he descends on her. They lock faces, dimensions rip apart, and she is both elated and disgusted, both turned on and repulsed (by his taste as well as her own mixed reactions to it). She can feel his scars at the corners of her mouth, leaning in to her cheeks, and his tongue is in her mouth and exploring violently and it's lovely and it's appalling and all at once she's reeling. Something sharp at her back. Realization grips her all too soon as the knife slides easily in between her shoulder blades. The kiss of death. She shoves away violently, and watches as his face melts away like candle wax to reveal her own face, perfectly mimicked, covered in peeling makeup. She squeals, pig-like in her fear and pain, and proceeds to strike out at this hideous new doppelgänger. Her fists hit a glass mirror, sending shards flying, erasing her own reflection until it's particles in the air and disintegrating into dust.
All of a sudden she's back on Earth, clinging to the couch cushions like a deranged cat, sweat collecting on her skin in thick beads and panting like she's just run a marathon. She considers trying to pick apart the dream, analyze it with her tired, disgusted (disgusting?) mind, but eventually decides against it – decides she doesn't want to know. Decides to try and go back to sleep with the hope that more rest will cause her to forget her own brain's shocking betrayal.
But it is several hours before sleep finds her again.