I apologize profusely for my absence and lack of writing. Please forgive me, but know that a host of new chapters will be sprouting up shortly, and I've even gone back and updated most of the other chapters. I am even working on a possible sequel, but please read on and enjoy and again I apologize for making you delightful readers wait so long.
. . .
CHAPTER 13: ACTRESS
Comfort finds her in the soft blackness of unconsciousness, and it is eons before the music comes – so quiet at first, but eventually with a pounding volume that increases, rising exponentially until she is drawn upward, forced to swim though what feels like a layer cake of a hundred or more heavy blankets until the sound encircles her and she is awake.
But this is before that.
Before the music everything is calm, and tranquil, and for just a moment time does not exist, in the same sense that it never truly existed for Martha Aiken. Perhaps she is still asleep in her bed, right now, with the Gotham nightly news droning continuously on in the background of her tiny, predictable life. Perhaps The Joker was never real, except in her mind as some phantom-like figment, a cruel combination of monstrosity and tenderness brought to life by her imagination alone.
She senses in some primal way that she is in a car, moving someplace. She can feel the rocking and smell the gasoline but she chooses to disregard this reality and stay in the eye of the hurricane. She envisions herself at it's center, staring off toward the horizon as the storm rages on. She is safe here, still and untouched and happily intent to watch the destruction of the world from a distance. She ignores the crackling pain that spark like bolts of thunder from the wound he left on her lips. The memory of her collapse is vague and fleeting, she is inside enough to avoid it. For now, all thoughts of love and passion and fear and freedom are set aside. Not gone, but left unacknowledged for the time being.
This place is a wasteland, a paradise.
Martha is herself and not herself. She wanders about the past events of the last few months, and it is as though she sees them from beyond herself, like watching some remote movie screen with an actress whose features resemble her own in an uncanny way. She spends her time judging this person, mentally correcting all the mistakes the protagonist of the film is making, finding herself both perplexed and mortified at the artless revelations that occur in-between the carnal acts preformed by the actress, and cursing the plot for having such a sudden, brutal twist. At one point the actress steps off the screen, and addresses Martha. The two speak as though they are strangers.
The doppelgänger says "You can be anywhere. Where do you want to be?"
Martha considers.
"Here." She replies, relatively sure of her answer.
"You can't stay." Reminds the actress, glowingly radiant in her work clothes. Martha recognizes the outfit, finds it funny that another woman might have the same taste in bank attire as herself, but there is no sense of familiarity to follow. Martha can not recognize this well-fed, unworried version of herself.
"Where do you want to be?"
The actress is too foreign a persona. It's as though Martha speaks with an echo of herself now, part of her that once was but no longer is.
Looking down, Martha sighs. "I don't know."
She mulls it over with an intense amount of effort and finds herself in her house, with the actress sitting on her bed beckoning for her to lay down. Martha doesn't, and continues to think. A variety of differing environments appear before her, none of which meet with her entire approval. All of them feel strangely empty, oddly unfulfilling, despite the small twinge of desire to stay proposed by each (her room, for example, is only slightly alluring). Her desk at Gotham 1st National, her childhood home, the meat locker at the delicatessen, The Joker's room, and finally, the wine cellar materialize for her observation. At this last place she finds herself standing in the doorway, looking in on the actress, who occupies the couch – holding Martha's copy of 'A Clockwork Orange' in the one hand and her deck of playing cards in the other.
"Where do you want to be?"
A wave of uneasiness hits Martha with such abrupt force that she nearly cries out. No place suits her and she suits no place, but she loathes no place more so than the wine cellar. Sadly, no place would pain her more to leave.
It comes out in a half-choked whisper, barely audible. "I have to leave."
The actress only smiles. "Where do you want to be?"
"I don't know."
"You do." Insist the actress.
"I don't want to be here." Martha confesses anxiously. "Not here."
"Do you want to escape?"
She starts to nod, shakes her head, puts her hands to her eyes and curls in on herself, defeated. The actress remains silky-voiced, subdued in her actions and seemingly unaffected by Martha's suffering.
"Do you want to stay?"
"I have to leave."
"But do you want to?"
Martha Aiken doesn't know. She has been a prisoner all her life, from her childhood home to her spot behind the teller's desk at the bank, to the couch in the wine cellar. Captivity, she discovers, is all she knows. She looks at the actress, finding such shinning beauty distasteful to her warped sensibility. How can anybody be so genial when sitting in a place so awful?
"You are weak, Martha Aiken."
Martha swallows hard at the insult but says nothing.
"You are weak because you allow yourself to be imprisoned. You are weak because you are afraid, and even though there's a part of you that fights back – it's only just woken up now – even thought that part of you exists, you choose to hide it away."
Martha goes to argue and the words die in her throat.
"The destruction of the universe is inevitable." Says the actress, smiling warmly. "Don't argue. You know it's true."
Martha can hear music now, weirdly detached like it's coming from another world, seeping in from someplace that she once inhabited. She can almost remember it, what that place was.
"What should I do?"
"There's nothing to do but smile." The actress explains, unruffled by the intruding sound.
"Why?"
"Death is unavoidable. You can either frown or smile. I suggest the latter."
Tiny particles of knowledge filter through, few are caught in the mesh.
"But why?" Asks Martha. "Why is it unavoidable? Why is it inevitable?"
The actress only smiles. The answer comes form behind – from The Joker, but as Martha whirls around she does not see the scarred, makeup stained face of some insane criminal, but rather the face of a normal, dull-eyed, fair haired young man whose smile is far from repulsive, and whose shape is far from menacing. He stands just behind her with his back to the wall, the corridor is extraordinarily dark, and the shadows cloak him almost entirely. He looks so much like her brother it's unnerving.
"It's inevitable because you will die." Says The Joker, voice terrifically humane. "You perceive the universe through life, therefore it exists. When you cease to exist, it ceases to exist."
The revaluation is almost base in it's simplicity, and she accepts it totally, without objection.
"Where do you want to be, Martha?" Asks The Joker.
The music is growing louder.
"I know where they want me to be." She tells him, and he holds his arms out for a hug. The volume of the music grows steadily, the way the voices through the walls had when Martha first woke up in the meat locker. In the arms of The Joker, Martha says "I know where I'm supposed to be, and not supposed to be. They teach you to find your way out of cage when you find yourself inside of one. They teach you that early on, and maybe they don't need to because it's already inside you from the beginning. The canary flaps and tweets like some outraged woman because it's a bird and that's what birds are supposed to do when you cage them."
"But the truth is that canaries grow accustomed to their cages." Explains the actress, still on the couch, still smiling. The world is fading away, and the music is invading Martha's haven. She remains in The Joker's embrace, warm, safe, and listening to the actress carry on. "The cat can't get them, they don't have to worry about migrating. Their cage is a paradise that cramps them. You're a bird in a cage that you like, but you thought you were supposed to flap. Whether or not you were supposed to is irrelevant. The point is, you broke your cage, Martha."
"I broke my . . . I broke my cage." Repeats Martha, with the last word distorting as her mouth turns down, hot tears welling at the corners of her eyes. She clings to The Joker and, remarkably, he holds her the way a man might hold his wife, touch so gentle and caring that it's partly jarring to her.
The Joker justifies this by revealing that she never asked to be put into one. "You find yourself in these situations, struggle, give up, and accept your captivity. But not anymore."
"I didn't mean to." She wails tiredly. "I don't know where I want to be, but I do. I do know."
"Do you hate yourself, Martha? Do you hate yourself for wanting to be with him?" She hears the actress inquire, perfectly valid in her curiosity as she struggles to compete with the clamorous music.
Martha weeps like a small child, the hollow tap of her bitter tears as they hit his shirt collar drowned out by the blaring sound. She hates herself for wanting to stay, she hates herself for wanting to go – she despises The Joker and she despises herself for having tricked him, for having plotted to use him and for having liked it. She mouths the words 'I'm so sorry' but nothing else is heard now, and the room begins to melt away.
She is coming out of it now.
Martha Aiken is rousing.