For my first post...I've been encouraged to put this up somewhere for someone, anyone, to read because Havokeff's right. It's not much if no one reads it...So here goes. (First chapter's a little long...)
Satan, n. One of the Creator’s lamentable mistakes, repented in sash-cloth and axes. Being instated as an archangel, Satan made himself multifariously objectionable and was finally expelled from Heaven. Halfway in his descent he paused, bent his head in thought a moment and at last went back. “There is one favor that I should like to ask,” said he.
“Name it.”
“Man, I understand, is about to be created. He will need laws.”
“What, wretch! You his appointed adversary, charged from the dawn of eternity with hatred of his soul – you ask for the right to make his laws?”
“Pardon; what I have to ask is that he be permitted to make them himself.”
It was so ordered. – The Devil’s Dictionary
Nightingale
Chapter 1
Running over rooftops. One leg swinging like a pendulum in front of the other. The cold breeze rushing over each calf in the wake of each leap as I jump over the decaying cityscape. I don’t worry about falling because it’s not in me to worry about something so trivial. I feel protected under the hardened leather and Kevlar armor. The mask over my pale complexion enough to conceal my identity from anyone I might encounter on this midnight errand.
Early, yes. We started early tonight. None of this three in the morning antebellum of who’s going to do what. Just one call in my com-link and I got to it. Quick and capable. That’s how I like to think of myself. I don’t know if he thinks this about me at all. Probably just a child to him, but I don’t let it distract me from the task I have to complete. If I’m lucky, I’ll come out alive.
Still flying across the large gaps between apartments, churches, some abandoned shithouse. The horizon is all the same to me. Archaic 12 stories jutting into the dark blue sky. It’s quiet as I swoop through the atmosphere, feeling more confident than I have in the last year. Since I first started working this racket; making a name for myself. Even the air feels different. It’s icy and pierces the delicate skin of my face, but I ignore it. Not important. I’m almost there and I hardly noticed how long it took me to slam my boots on the roof. Crouching briefly before getting my bearings and standing to meet Robin waiting with his foot on the ledge, overlooking the roof.
Tonight is different. Tonight something big is up. Something very bad, I’m hearing from the discussion that is taking place between Robin and the invisible voice coming through our com-links. Bruce. The Bat. Giving us a titillating rundown of previous events that have led to this one germination in a long line of shitty ones before it. I can hardly keep the jitters in my stomach from doing multiple tumbling acts as I approach Tim with the most seductive strut I can manage. It’s not for him. It’s not for anybody. The slippery leather over my skin gets me every time. I always feel like some misplaced dominatrix in the unbearably constricting suit. Bearable for me. No cape. Sorry, I’m not a cape person.
“Nightingale. Location?” The Bat’s voice is relatively flat right now. Everything a job to him. So serious. In the beginning, I attempted every avenue to lighten him up, but only came to dead ends. Over the course of the last twelve months, many in seclusion for training, I’ve come to discover why everyone comes out of this with reformed personality complexes. I can’t rub off on the bat. He rubs off on me.
“Top of the Towers.” Tim turns towards me and crosses his little arms. He seems frustrated by something and his little rumpling face says this isn’t going to be good. “What’s going on, B?” I always call him B. He’s never said anything to me about it. He looked at me with that stoic and hard-pressed face that communicates no emotional release whatsoever the first time it slipped from my mouth. I kept doing it. He responds. I figure that’s a good sign.
“Keep an eye out. Joker’s on the move.”
“But it’s been six months.” I’ve been relatively lucky. We’ve never informally met. I’ve never even seen the guy. A boogeyman. A ghost. A premonition. A scary story to tell kids before tucking them in at night so they don’t run the streets alone, or climb electrical towers, or whatever trouble kids get into nowadays. I’ve heard a million stories. Seen a million pictures from the unlucky newspaper photog’s mismanaged attempts to the faintly entertaining and numerous mug shots. And though B kept it from me, Dick slipped chunks of videotape – a mess of what could only be Arkham’s surveillance tapes chopped and edited together – just so I might not be surprised. So I might have the upper hand because our meeting was inevitable. And I watched the tapes. Over and over in my apartment in the middle of the night, the rewind and fast forward buttons within my immediate reach. And I watched diligently and studied his mannerisms, his speech, his mien, and though I couldn’t count on my fingers and toes the hours I wasted in unblinking Clockwork Orange fortitude, he still eluded me. Fascinated me. Kept me on the edge of my wrought iron chair as though the villain of a film-noir, on the verge of capture, and yet he never was. Even when literally imprisoned, something about him…remained unencumbered by straight-jackets or shackles. It seemed as if Newgate Prison could’ve held him and yet he would’ve remained unbroken.
“Six months…is just enough.” His voice is unwavering. Even over the intercom, the static and the wind interposing between the microphone, nothing in his voice quivers or fears…anything, it seems. Not even Joker, possibly recouped, strengthened, formidable, could shake him. And it made me wonder: who was more insane?
I cross a wooden plank balanced on either side by bricks, for no reason whatsoever, and extend my arms as though on a beam, an acrobat, high above the muted crowd watching fervently – not for my victory at having crossed with elegance and precision, but for my accidental fall and death. They, the crowd, they wanted my victimization. They didn’t want success. They wanted failure, the display of gravity’s hostile takeover within my defiance of that base element. And I see the parallel. The bat and the clown, and I contemplate their constant battle, the enduring encounters, the scuffling melee, and it suddenly begins to make sense.
“So…” I try not to let my voice crack in anxiety. I was excited about five minutes ago while flying through the air like a Leer jet. Now I’m starting to feel sort of girly. As if I’ve just spent the last few moments boasting and now there’s a bug on the floor and I jumped up on a chair to escape it. “So what do we do if we…”
An explosion cuts me off. Rocks the entire roof of the towers. Just as Dick was coming up on my backside and grabbing me before I toppled like a stack of playing cards, righting my balance.
“I got you.” Now I really feel useless. I can’t even stand on my own two feet. Got myself spooked already and I just got here. Even Tim isn’t breaking a sweat as he leans over the side of the towers to inspect any possible foibles. Unafraid. Ready for anything to fly in his direction and he meets it head-on.
Dick lets me go and makes a quick beeline for the building’s edge. Peering over the brightly lit haze of yellow and orange emanating from below us. Something..burning.
“Nightwing. Update.”
“The building. It’s on fire.” He seems confused.
Tim jumps in. “Someone just bombed the lower floors of Wayne Towers.”
We’re dumb right now. All three of us. Really, we should be escaping this potentially fatal cataclysm of tumbling rock and debris that could soon be this building. Instead we stay right where we are and await orders. It’s as if we’re all slaves to the big bird on the other end. Our momma. Our boss.
“I’m going in.” Dick takes off towards the emergency roof exit. I follow like a sheep. Tim is right beside me as if we’re competing for whoever gets through the door first. Like this is a contest.
“He’s just…Don’t do anything stupid.” The crackling radio voice over the line sounds as if it’s moving. Like a cell phone from the car. Sounds wizzing by the voice that indicate he’s on his way.
“I don’t care. Fuck this clown. I’m going after him.”
The inside of the building is black. Blacker than black, if that depth of darkness exists in reality. It feels as if this is the bleakest hallway I’ve ever been in. Just by the lack of sound or breathing I can tell all three of us are huddled somewhere in the stairwell, not far from each other. Each holding a breath before letting is slip so silently you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t trying to hear for it.
“Dick, don’t do this. You’re asking for trouble.”
“I’ll go with him.” Tim is such a little ass-kisser. A wannabe boy scout. He should be subbing for Supes. I hear a sigh over the com-link.
“Fine….fine.” He’s stubborn and angry about it. “Em. Roof. Now.”
I don’t waste time adhering to this demand. Just run out the door I came in from, flooding the stairwell with light. Enough that I notice I’m alone in this darkness. They’ve already fled. Instead, I approach B on the roof who waits for my approach. Ominous in the breeze that flaps his cape about. It’s so cartoonish, but the light of the moon gleaming down on him also forces an eerie Dracula-esque sort of aura. He’s a freak. We’re all freaks, running around on rooftops, pretending to be superheros.
I feel as if I’m some failure already for not going off on my own. As if being a rebel is part of wearing the symbol. They all do it but me. I’m pretty much a pushover, for now. I like rules and I always try to abide by them. Even when they aren’t my own. I prefer to walk the lines. Stay in the safety of his shadow until something – something enduring and base instinctual – ruptures and forces me proactive. But for now, we don’t speak. Just watch.
“Superficial explosions.” I can’t tell if he’s talking to me or just to himself. His eyes dart from under the charcoal cowl, hunting and prowling. “Playing games.”
“Why would he bomb Wayne Towers? He doesn’t know you’re…” I look up at him and realize something about his frown says I shouldn’t be so sure of anything I think. My thoughts are pretty much null and void 24-hours a day around these parts. Nothing is ever certain.
“Getting my attention…” He spins around, hovering over the side of the towers as multiple fire engines attempt to dethrone the blaze below. I continue to scan the roof’s circumference, though unsure what I’m looking for, or waiting for. And gnawing at my bottom lip only serves to sever the flesh, draw the blood from the now swollen thickness enduring the brunt of my nerves, and dripping on my paltry tongue. I’m hungry. I’m sick. I’m nervous. I have to pee. My pinkie toe stings inside my pointed boot and attempt to alleviate the annoyance by wiggling my other piggies, but the distraction proves beneficial to only one, and it’s not me.
“Lookin’ for me, handsome?” I look up surprised. Not at the electrifying green hair, the mime’s white face, the deep cherry red of his mouth, but at the creepiness of the voice flowing through the wind towards me. I’m so sorry I didn’t take the dense, emasculating hallway.
“Whaddyou want?” B doesn’t attack him. He doesn’t even move a foot. He stands his ground, immovable. I try to imitate him, but I’m sure it comes out clumsy in comparison.
“Nothing important.” Even in the dead of night his glassy green eyes affix my own and he winks. Stupidly I cock my head like a deaf, dumb dog attempting to understand, but it serves to keep me occupied with him. Unable to look away as he casually walks to the ledge adjacent to us, though still some fee away, and sits. “Thought you’d like to…introduce us.” I watch as this clown lights a cigarette from his coat pocket. Clutched between two gloved fingers in careful coaxing before coddled between cranberry lips and lit.
B doesn’t answer, but stands straight and still like a pillar. Arms crossed defiantly, he just waits like he’s got all the time in the world.
“I know…you’re thinkin’ ‘but I’m the kinda’ guy who needs no introduction.’” He smiles, cigarette dangling from his mouth. “That’s sweet. It’s why I like you.”
“That it?” It’s not as if I let B have this quippage out of choice. I haven’t any way of getting involved in the imbroglio, so I’m inadvertently mute.
“Maybe.” He smiles and I’m trying not to stare. I look at B in the hopes he has some sort of plan written on his face. As if his straight eyes and flaring nostrils will tell me what to do at exactly the right moment. “Maybe there’s more…fireworks.” No really, I don’t want to like this guy, but I think he caught the smirk on my face I couldn’t control for a split second.
Before B can ask any more questions, another deafening boom explodes from below. Maybe superficial, maybe not, but enough for us to worry about Tim and Dick who might’ve walked right into it.
“Robin, Nightwing?” He questions the airwaves and gets nothing. I don’t even hear breathing over the intercom. Just silence. A dead one. “I’m going down.” What what what? “Go. Now.”
“But I…” I break, stop myself before I’m exposed, but it’s too late. He’s smiling between drags of his cigarette, relaxed with a weakly crossed leg as if his plan is playing out to perfection. And in that moment, I have to get away. But I don’t want to. I want to stay. I think…I think I do…something.
B hops the ledge, vanishing into the air and suspecting I’m behind him like my obedience would dictate, swinging in through a window – broken or unbroken – crashing through to find Dick and Tim in a disheveled state and possibly choking on whatever fumes have them encumbered. And he saves them, just like he always does. But when he looks up, he finds I’m not there. Cause I’m still on the roof.
“Alone at last.” He smiles and stands before walking towards me. Sure I should know what to do at this moment. I stand there. I stand my ground and appear unphased by him. By this strutting masquerade approaching.
“Part of your ultimate plan? To get me alone on a rooftop?” I laugh a tiresome and perturbed little chortle, crossing my arms. “It’ll take more than blowing up a building to impress me, P.T. Barnum.” Palms are clammy under the gloves.
“I heard you had a mouth on you.” He eyes me up and down. “Guess Eddie was a little lax describing your cute little ass, however.”
Riddler. That guy’s a joke if ever there was one. “If you’re trying to piss me off...” Slight twinges of animosity surge throughout my bloodstream, along with a hot flash that forces perspiration under my suit. I’m turning red as he’s circling me. Making me nervous.
“And what’re you gonna’ do?” Looking up at him is sort of straining my neck. He must be the equivalent of at least two of me in height. Normally, it would be sexy. I’m fighting the urge every second.
“What I have to.” My height is an advantage here. Just crouch down and kick his long legs out and most likely shatter both his shins in the process. The cracking noise is sort of musical in a way. Like background clapping noises on a playback track for your favorite song. Not like punching someone in the face and breaking a nose. That sort of makes more of a stumping sound. It’s kind of lackluster in its delivery.
“I’m not really dressed for wrestling. Though I’m sure if you tried…” His index runs the length of my leathered collarbone. “…you could change my mind.”
Grab the finger. Twist it all the way around in the wrong direction. I watch his body contort, twist like a warm pretzel onto his knees as if about to beg me to release him.
“Oh, yea, baby. That’s just how I like it.” He smiles a wicked grin before biting his bottom lip. I guess I was wrong. He may beg, but not for that. I smirk and let him see it. Hardly one to begrudge anyone their twisted sexual perversions. I’m no hypocrite.
“You like that?” I lean in closer. Get a good look at him. I want to know him intimately, like a treasure map memorized.
“If you wanted me down here…” He leans forward, regardless of the pressure I put on his crunching fingers. “All you had to do was ask.” I don’t stop him. I don’t back away as he curls towards me like a snake, a lecherous serpent of the devil himself, sets his tongue between the slick leather of my thighs, licking once. The suit is thick, heavy-set armor on most pressure points and targets. But I felt it easily enough.
I don’t wait. I crack a hard fist over his cheek, feeling the clatter of his teeth beneath the weight of my impact. Nothing. It doesn’t even weaken his bantam rictus, leering at me. He’s not going to go down easy. He spits a small amount of blood from between his lips before looking back up.
“Aren’t you gonna’ teach me a lesson, or oh…” He giggles softly. “…I get it. You’re trying to seduce me.” I loosen his fingers and act fast. Jab to the nose. Hook to the cheek. As he’s bent over, knee to the face. I must admit, I am getting a little turned on watching him lay out on the cement. Flat on his back, holding his nose.
“Are you hard yet, or should I…keep doing my stuff?” I’m standing over him, resting on one hip, one leg bent and a proudly placed boot on his shoulder. He pulls his hands away, white face muddled with seeping crimson blood, ruining his beautiful canvas. I’m sorry to say I had to do it. I’m already quite fond of his peculiar eccentricities. The grotesque anomaly of his face especially captivates me. I long to swipe my fingers over his cheeks. Feel his skin. Perhaps the softest I’ve ever felt.
His gloved fingers curl around my lower leg, sliding upwards. “What’s your hurry? Don’t you like foreplay?” Hands hooking around my foot and ankle instantly pitch me forward, sending me onto my stomach adjacent to him, knocking my own forehead on the cement before adequately able to stop myself. I roll over just in time to witness his descent atop me, hard, bone crunching knees debilitating my arms. “Didn’t anyone tell you half the fun of getting there…” His fingers slide down my clavicle, over the shiny black and red leather of my suit. “Is the ride?” Back up again, jingling the zipper at my neck.
I used to love banter with all its innuendo and double entendre and maybe a year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from exchanging verbal quips with him. I’m all body now. I want the fight. I want to see him struggle. I want him to wrestle me with all he’s got and knock the wind out of me. Asphyxiate me. Crack my lip, my jaw, my nose. Hurt me and I’m going to exacerbate his desire to retaliate shortly.
My legs swing up behind him, lock my ankles around his throat and flip him backwards, releasing the pressure on my arms, but I haven’t the time to discern the damage done. By the time I’m on my feet, he’s already got me down again with a hard kick to my chest, sending me into a corner of the rooftop nearby. Knocking my head against brick makes me loopy, enough I don’t see him pleasantly striding towards me, straddling me where I lay, defenseless in a stupor.
“You’re quite the tease…” Our chests press together. I imagine if I were naked, the soft mounds that are my breasts would look rather enticing smashed against his white pectorals. His charisma is getting the better of me.
“I enjoy the chase.” No longer seeing double. My senses aligned. Still, I don’t fight him.
“I think you like the pain…” He’s close enough to my mouth we could easily exchange a kiss. “…Emma.”
Nightingale (Batman fanfic) Updated 12/15 - Last Chapter
Moderator: LadyTevar
Nightingale (Batman fanfic) Updated 12/15 - Last Chapter
Last edited by The Wench on 2008-12-15 05:10am, edited 15 times in total.
Rather fucked up, imho.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Not exactly humble, but what exactly was "fucked up"? I'm assuming you mean the way she handled the characterizations of the Joker and, her character, Nightingale?LadyTevar wrote:Rather fucked up, imho.
It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it.
Blank Yellow (NSFW)
Hit it.
Blank Yellow (NSFW)
"Mostly Harmless Nutcase"
I mean the sex-play between herself and the Joker, in general.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Good then.LadyTevar wrote:I mean the sex-play between herself and the Joker, in general.
That's what she was going for. She has a very specific vision of the Joker and it's not pretty. Apparently it gets worse in the story. 
It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it.
Blank Yellow (NSFW)
Hit it.
Blank Yellow (NSFW)
"Mostly Harmless Nutcase"
Chapter 2
Not as long...phooey on you if you don't like it...I may just keep posting in spite of it. And make every damned attempt to make this formatting work...
Chapter 2
I don’t know how he got my name. It’s haunting me. In my dreams. In my nightmares. I spent the last three days alone in the cave out of three weeks hiding in the mansion, biting my fingernails with anxious perseverance, now whittled down to nothing but red, irritated tips of skin.
I convinced Bruce I was just shaken up, afraid to be alone in my apartment because the threat of Joker seemed so real to me now. Palpable. He knows me. My identity. What else might he know? Dick? Tim? Even the Bat? Does he know who we all are? Are we merely playthings, marionettes, hanging by the wires he cleverly manipulates from behind the curtain? I’m scared. Scared he’ll hunt me down. Find me. Suddenly appear in the middle of the night in my apartment, glaring at me with an entire set of white teeth in a befitting smile. What scares me more is I wish for it.
“We picked him up over 3 weeks ago, Emma.” Dick Grayson. They call him Nightwing. He’s just like Bruce, Batman, stoic and cold, mixed with a little bit of Tim Drake, Robin, a little jokester himself, but with innocent perseverance and a steadfast do-gooder mentality that is hard to come by for someone so young. His parents, may they rest, raised him well. “He’s holed up in Arkham. You don’t have to worry so much.” He’s sitting in one of the leather chairs, facing the computer, occasionally spinning around to smile at me in another, some distance away.
“I know, I know. He just…” He made me want to do terrible things. Things I haven’t thought about since... “He freaked me out, I guess.” Dick laughs to himself, mouth shut, throat making a small chuckling noise as he watches me chew my fingers to oblivion. I must be playing the part of the worried girl very well because he’s been down here for hours keeping me company, tapping away at the computer, checking back catalogues of information while he rambles about this and that, trying to keep my mind off it.
“You did get a little too up close and personal.” Tap tap tap on the keyboard. A plastic sort of clicking that can be both annoying and comforting, depending on your outlook. “He’s a nasty customer. I’d be freaked out if I were you, too.” I know he’s trying to calm my nerves by sympathizing, empathizing as much as possible. But he can’t possibly understand. “It’s a good thing we got there when we did.” He’s right. I was in too much shock lying underneath the suited menace to get the gumption to kick him off. When he whispered my name, it felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. Something woke me up and petrified me all at once. A conglomerate of emotions surged through me. Fear, anger, irritation, passion. I’m confused. I don’t understand what to do with it, or what to make of it. What does it mean?
“Yea, it was.” Dick had come out of nowhere it seemed, sending Joker into the brick wall that supported me as I lay underneath him, helpless as he provoked me, like a sorcerer conjuring black magic. Emma Mathews…The way it slithered through his lips, like incantation. You may have the bat convinced…I can still hear him chanting in my ear as if it were yesterday. As if time stood still the moment he spoke it. But I know the real you…Elvira Mathers…Then he was slammed, unconscious in the bricks beside me with the force of Dick behind the attack. I didn’t get to hear what else he was going to say to me and I can’t decide what’s haunting me more. The fact he knows my identity, or that I won’t know what he was going to say next and I haven’t the balls to go to Arkham and find out.
“Em…” It’s B. He’s stepping into the cave from upstairs, down the long, winding and hollowed out staircase from the house to this sub-chamber. His steps are quiet, though he’s a huge force of impenetrable muscle. I’m jolted from thought, looking over at him from my fetal curl in the chair. He’s still pissed at me for having mistook myself for an avenger, for not listening to him when he pointed to the side of the towers and insinuated I follow towards Dick and Tim’s potential threat. But I disobeyed.
“Hmm?” My thumb still dawdles inside my mouth, my saliva having wrinkled the skin at this point to resemble a prune, just out of a long, hot shower.
“Riddler’s caught in Robinson Park. Get him out. Take him to Arkham.” I’m beginning to get the impression we’re some sort of garbage collecting program, taking the recycling to the plant at the end of the day.
“But Ivy…” I hate Poison Ivy. My first night out I found myself a jumbled up cat’s cradle for her trees. Broke my leg and left me with some severe scrapes which wouldn’t have bothered me save for the poison she included for good measure. I was in bed for two weeks, recovering after the antidote, some concoction of Bruce’s, saved my life. She made me feel like such a dolt. Inadequate.
“She wants him out more than she wants to harm you. In and out. Go get him.” I don’t want to make it an argument. I just have to go do it and get over myself. It’s a simple job and I could do it with my eyes shut if I weren’t so distracted. “Take the bike.”
I’m out. I’m flying through the streets and I feel exhilarated. A weight has been lifted now that I brave the real streets. I can take a breath, let it out and feel as though I’m in control again. The clown doesn’t concern me. He’s far from my mind as I breeze towards the park, kill the engine and swing off the saddle of my motorized steed in front of the gates, overpowered by winding ivy and overgrown flora. This is Ivy’s territory and everyone stays out. Even after NML, after Luthor seemed to grow the town from rubble, parts of it are still under jurisdiction of the criminal elite. Pam is relatively quiet, enjoying a serene and angelic existence among the trees. She has everything she needs here. We’ve agreed to let her remain as long as she takes no lives, only rats out the uninhabitable, namely Eddie Nigma. And harms no innocents. She’s usually the least of our worries.
I step through the gates. At midnight, this is relatively late for her to be up and her plants seem on edge, twisting and writhing in response to my entreaty, but they know why I’m here, so they don’t bother me. I just want to get this over with.
I’m careful not to crunch anything that would get me in trouble. A flower, a vegetable, a random limb hanging out to puncture me innocently, and follow the beaten path towards one of the park’s benches where I see the unmistakable visage of Riddler, wiggling inside an impenetrable shield of foliage. I try not to laugh at how absurd he appears, eyes peeping out wildly through a couple of heavy branches, begging for release. His vapid mumbling tries to force words, but it’s no use. I approach him and tap the branches with my knuckles, knocking.
“What’d you go and do, Nigma?” I smile, feeling impenetrable in my guise. Like a symbol, a metaphor, a meaning, instead of a person. I’m here to do a duty for a higher power, a bigger purpose. More than just the will of a single person or even a few. But for an infinite conglomerate of victims and potentials, waiting in the wings for someone like Eddie to take advantage of their weaknesses. He’s lucky I’m just taking him to Arkham. Probably the safest place for him when he’s not in control of his own faculties, such as now. He’s a rat. He gives up information when it suits his own ends. He should thank his lucky stars Pam hasn’t done worse, saved everyone the hassle.
He wiggles more, but I just laugh in response. Even if he were unobstructed, he’s hardly a threat to me in any physical way. He’s not the brute force of Two-Face or Mr. Freeze, nor the psychological threat of Scarecrow or even Mad Hatter. Sometimes he’s able to rouse a little more attention than he should, but I often equate him with the bullied whiz kid on the playground now older, outraged, and in love with crossword puzzles.
“Okay, Ivy. Let him go.” I don’t need to be louder than a voice in the library. She can hear me, even without direction or speaking face to face. Her plants glide away, as if never having been there to begin with and he wriggles from their clutches, thankful to be free again.
“Oh, thank god, Nightingale.” He breathes heavily, as if having run a mile, catching his breath at the finish line. “Get that vile woman from out of those bushes and punish her and those despicable plants.”
I roll my eyes. “C’mon, Eddie.” I click one cuff around his wrist, the other around my own. He’s silent and melancholy once realizing he’s being punished and not his attacker, whom he most likely provoked, and he follows. In and out. No problem. If only it weren’t for my next challenge. Arkham.
Chapter 2
I don’t know how he got my name. It’s haunting me. In my dreams. In my nightmares. I spent the last three days alone in the cave out of three weeks hiding in the mansion, biting my fingernails with anxious perseverance, now whittled down to nothing but red, irritated tips of skin.
I convinced Bruce I was just shaken up, afraid to be alone in my apartment because the threat of Joker seemed so real to me now. Palpable. He knows me. My identity. What else might he know? Dick? Tim? Even the Bat? Does he know who we all are? Are we merely playthings, marionettes, hanging by the wires he cleverly manipulates from behind the curtain? I’m scared. Scared he’ll hunt me down. Find me. Suddenly appear in the middle of the night in my apartment, glaring at me with an entire set of white teeth in a befitting smile. What scares me more is I wish for it.
“We picked him up over 3 weeks ago, Emma.” Dick Grayson. They call him Nightwing. He’s just like Bruce, Batman, stoic and cold, mixed with a little bit of Tim Drake, Robin, a little jokester himself, but with innocent perseverance and a steadfast do-gooder mentality that is hard to come by for someone so young. His parents, may they rest, raised him well. “He’s holed up in Arkham. You don’t have to worry so much.” He’s sitting in one of the leather chairs, facing the computer, occasionally spinning around to smile at me in another, some distance away.
“I know, I know. He just…” He made me want to do terrible things. Things I haven’t thought about since... “He freaked me out, I guess.” Dick laughs to himself, mouth shut, throat making a small chuckling noise as he watches me chew my fingers to oblivion. I must be playing the part of the worried girl very well because he’s been down here for hours keeping me company, tapping away at the computer, checking back catalogues of information while he rambles about this and that, trying to keep my mind off it.
“You did get a little too up close and personal.” Tap tap tap on the keyboard. A plastic sort of clicking that can be both annoying and comforting, depending on your outlook. “He’s a nasty customer. I’d be freaked out if I were you, too.” I know he’s trying to calm my nerves by sympathizing, empathizing as much as possible. But he can’t possibly understand. “It’s a good thing we got there when we did.” He’s right. I was in too much shock lying underneath the suited menace to get the gumption to kick him off. When he whispered my name, it felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. Something woke me up and petrified me all at once. A conglomerate of emotions surged through me. Fear, anger, irritation, passion. I’m confused. I don’t understand what to do with it, or what to make of it. What does it mean?
“Yea, it was.” Dick had come out of nowhere it seemed, sending Joker into the brick wall that supported me as I lay underneath him, helpless as he provoked me, like a sorcerer conjuring black magic. Emma Mathews…The way it slithered through his lips, like incantation. You may have the bat convinced…I can still hear him chanting in my ear as if it were yesterday. As if time stood still the moment he spoke it. But I know the real you…Elvira Mathers…Then he was slammed, unconscious in the bricks beside me with the force of Dick behind the attack. I didn’t get to hear what else he was going to say to me and I can’t decide what’s haunting me more. The fact he knows my identity, or that I won’t know what he was going to say next and I haven’t the balls to go to Arkham and find out.
“Em…” It’s B. He’s stepping into the cave from upstairs, down the long, winding and hollowed out staircase from the house to this sub-chamber. His steps are quiet, though he’s a huge force of impenetrable muscle. I’m jolted from thought, looking over at him from my fetal curl in the chair. He’s still pissed at me for having mistook myself for an avenger, for not listening to him when he pointed to the side of the towers and insinuated I follow towards Dick and Tim’s potential threat. But I disobeyed.
“Hmm?” My thumb still dawdles inside my mouth, my saliva having wrinkled the skin at this point to resemble a prune, just out of a long, hot shower.
“Riddler’s caught in Robinson Park. Get him out. Take him to Arkham.” I’m beginning to get the impression we’re some sort of garbage collecting program, taking the recycling to the plant at the end of the day.
“But Ivy…” I hate Poison Ivy. My first night out I found myself a jumbled up cat’s cradle for her trees. Broke my leg and left me with some severe scrapes which wouldn’t have bothered me save for the poison she included for good measure. I was in bed for two weeks, recovering after the antidote, some concoction of Bruce’s, saved my life. She made me feel like such a dolt. Inadequate.
“She wants him out more than she wants to harm you. In and out. Go get him.” I don’t want to make it an argument. I just have to go do it and get over myself. It’s a simple job and I could do it with my eyes shut if I weren’t so distracted. “Take the bike.”
I’m out. I’m flying through the streets and I feel exhilarated. A weight has been lifted now that I brave the real streets. I can take a breath, let it out and feel as though I’m in control again. The clown doesn’t concern me. He’s far from my mind as I breeze towards the park, kill the engine and swing off the saddle of my motorized steed in front of the gates, overpowered by winding ivy and overgrown flora. This is Ivy’s territory and everyone stays out. Even after NML, after Luthor seemed to grow the town from rubble, parts of it are still under jurisdiction of the criminal elite. Pam is relatively quiet, enjoying a serene and angelic existence among the trees. She has everything she needs here. We’ve agreed to let her remain as long as she takes no lives, only rats out the uninhabitable, namely Eddie Nigma. And harms no innocents. She’s usually the least of our worries.
I step through the gates. At midnight, this is relatively late for her to be up and her plants seem on edge, twisting and writhing in response to my entreaty, but they know why I’m here, so they don’t bother me. I just want to get this over with.
I’m careful not to crunch anything that would get me in trouble. A flower, a vegetable, a random limb hanging out to puncture me innocently, and follow the beaten path towards one of the park’s benches where I see the unmistakable visage of Riddler, wiggling inside an impenetrable shield of foliage. I try not to laugh at how absurd he appears, eyes peeping out wildly through a couple of heavy branches, begging for release. His vapid mumbling tries to force words, but it’s no use. I approach him and tap the branches with my knuckles, knocking.
“What’d you go and do, Nigma?” I smile, feeling impenetrable in my guise. Like a symbol, a metaphor, a meaning, instead of a person. I’m here to do a duty for a higher power, a bigger purpose. More than just the will of a single person or even a few. But for an infinite conglomerate of victims and potentials, waiting in the wings for someone like Eddie to take advantage of their weaknesses. He’s lucky I’m just taking him to Arkham. Probably the safest place for him when he’s not in control of his own faculties, such as now. He’s a rat. He gives up information when it suits his own ends. He should thank his lucky stars Pam hasn’t done worse, saved everyone the hassle.
He wiggles more, but I just laugh in response. Even if he were unobstructed, he’s hardly a threat to me in any physical way. He’s not the brute force of Two-Face or Mr. Freeze, nor the psychological threat of Scarecrow or even Mad Hatter. Sometimes he’s able to rouse a little more attention than he should, but I often equate him with the bullied whiz kid on the playground now older, outraged, and in love with crossword puzzles.
“Okay, Ivy. Let him go.” I don’t need to be louder than a voice in the library. She can hear me, even without direction or speaking face to face. Her plants glide away, as if never having been there to begin with and he wriggles from their clutches, thankful to be free again.
“Oh, thank god, Nightingale.” He breathes heavily, as if having run a mile, catching his breath at the finish line. “Get that vile woman from out of those bushes and punish her and those despicable plants.”
I roll my eyes. “C’mon, Eddie.” I click one cuff around his wrist, the other around my own. He’s silent and melancholy once realizing he’s being punished and not his attacker, whom he most likely provoked, and he follows. In and out. No problem. If only it weren’t for my next challenge. Arkham.
Chapter 3
Okay, so I lied. It's not chapter three that's the raunchy, screwed up chapter...
Chapter 3
Arkham is the last real homage to an older Gotham City. It’s been remodeled to suit the technological advancements such a place should be afforded, but its concept, its meaning, is much older than the physical structure itself. The circular construct is modernized, maybe even a little symbolic, meant to house thousands of rooms, one atop the other towards the sky to infinity. There have been times in the past where every room is full. There are times when only several of the vestibules secure a body and sometimes those are precarious in the best of situations because no matter how updated or reformed the building or its high-tech, new age-ey doctors become, escape is rampant. For some it’s a nightmare to be housed inside. For others, it’s just a vacation between indiscretions. For the question mark man in my current possession, it’s going to be like being bullied on the playground all over again.
“I don’t belong in here and you know it. I’ll be tortured. Beaten for no reason. Let that eat away at your conscience in the middle of the night!” I watch the guards take him away, down the brightly lit hallway that most notably resembles the doctor’s office. That of an ominous pathway towards an operating room, or even the morgue. Any place you don’t want to be in on hospital grounds. I wave in his wake.
“Bye, Eddie.” He disappears behind swinging doors, as if cooks pulling him towards the big kitchen to make Riddler stew, and I look around myself. Quiet. I’m in a lobby of sorts, if you could give such a place something as inappropriate as a waiting room. It’s a prison for psychopaths, not a place for visitors, though they acquire them on occasion. A dark hallway to my right, a dark hallway to my left, all curving into the labyrinth of circles that make its construct. It’s early. Only 1 a.m. and my com-link hasn’t made a peep since I informed B my operation was fulfilled, and I’m wide awake. Maybe I’ll take a walk.
Strange place for a stroll, but I’ve always been curious about Arkham. One of the infamous of its kind. There’s many like it across the country, but this one is special for housing some of the most wicked and vile. Sometimes they ship them out here like produce from other countries are imported. I’ve narrowly escaped wandering its woebegone hallways in the past. Now’s my chance to see it on friendly terms.
Impenetrable, bulletproof, hammer-proof, soundproof, anything-proof glass makes every detainee visible. Long gone are the days when steel doors with one little square in the middle to voice complaints kept these guys under lock and key. Too many people were escaping with too long a span of time between knowing and not knowing. With glass doors, all you have to do is look to see you’re standing in a pile of shit. Regular walk-throughs are performed twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, just to make sure anyone who should be there is accounted for. It makes sense, though all concept of privacy is extinct when you have a hallway with cells parallel to each other. I imagine John so-and-so isn’t too happy when he’s housed across someone like Two-Face or Joker, staring them down, but somehow the Constitution, basic human and civil rights, are exempt here. Void behind these doors and it’s not legal, but the powers that be turn their heads the other way, content to let it continue.
I start thinking about him as I walk the silent hallway. Most rooms are faintly lit, just enough that a midnight walk to perform a head count in the event of an emergency would be possible. Everyone asleep, just as they should be. I think about his sneering grin, barreling down on me. The eerie jade of his eyes, sparkling even without moonlight, like the possessed in need of an exorcism. Cell after cell, some habited, most not, passing me by as I take the scenic route. I don’t know how long I’ve been walking these halls, but I’m far from the exit and I start to creep myself out, holding my own waist to give myself comfort or some sense of protection. Passing empty cell after empty cell, thinking about all the animals out there that should be in here, filling these empty cages.
Then I see him.
He sees me first. I can tell he’s been looking at me for a couple seconds longer than I have him. Watching me as I wander aimlessly. The corner of his lips cracked upward, amused. Standing in the middle of his cell oddly, as if my presence has interrupted him in the middle of something, like pacing. A burning cigarette sitting between his white fingers, smoke swirling and rising towards his face like an eerie fog. I’m frozen. I don’t know what to do. I should turn around and walk away as if he doesn’t bother me. As if I’m not still thinking about him, but I can’t get him out of my head and here he is, materialized as reference to the face I see in my imagination every night. The face that makes my dreams so vivid and torturous because in them, I want him more than anything – just before waking in pouring sweat.
We stare at each other for a brief few seconds as if either of us can’t figure out what the other is doing in here. As if at a bar and suddenly bumping into each other after a long absence of acquaintance. Some bumping into. I think to look away, but his hands get my attention. Putting the cigarette between his red lips, his fingers move fluidly, quickly. He’s signing.
What are you doing? He smiles as if the curiosity of it is entertaining enough and the answer isn’t necessary.
Why are you awake? I’m trying to hide the look on my face that says I’m impressed. He signs as if second nature, another language, deaf himself.
Insomniac. He looks at me, waiting. This is the part where you answer my question.
Bringing in Riddler. It takes a second since I have to spell out each individual letter. He laughs aloud, though I can’t hear him. I wait until he’s looking at me again. Thought I would take a walk. I have yet to consider why I’m bothering telling him. Maybe the fact I’m free to wander is enough.
Funny place for a walk. His smile is somewhat contagious and I find I’m trying to fight wanting to keep this up. Figuratively speaking. I haven’t had a signing partner in over a decade.
I was thinking. Even behind the glass, however, he’s still frightening. It’s something about his face. Animated. It says so much and yet, he says nothing. It’s not curious, but knowing. As if he’s heard all about me, has me figured out and the look on his face says he’s not surprised.
About?
His signing – it’s…strange. Why would he know something like that?
None of your business. I try to appear annoyed he even thought to ask, as though I would tell him. I shouldn’t be divulging what I am already. But so much about me is revealed already. Just in the flick of my wrist, in the turn of my pinkie finger, in the hook of my thumbs as we communicate.
Thinking about me? His grin is becoming seductive, half-closed lids making bedroom eyes from behind the glass. Without a voice, without real words, he’s still getting to me. Giving yourself nightmares? I don’t answer him. I look away for a brief moment, letting the preparation of my signing hands fall to my sides, then place my arms around myself again as though a shy little girl, then look back, trying to get the strength to tell him off. This would be my chance. His hands start up again. Oh, I see. Not nightmares. He raises his eyebrows suggestively. Fantasies, maybe? He smiles and my grimace only exacerbates it. I’m not playing this game with him all over again. I have the will to end it. We’re not on the roof anymore and he’s not hovering over me like something primal from inside my psyche I just imagined to seduce me.
I wouldn’t waste my time. You’re not worth the effort. I realize I should be utilizing this rare moment to probe him. I rest my weight on my hip, changing position, changing demeanor, hopefully changing this conversation. How do you know my name? He chuckles, taking a puff from his cigarette.
Guess. He’s closer to the glass now as if baiting me, making me stay and talk to him. Keep him entertained because I’m sure that’s all I am. An amusement for his games. That I’m dumb enough to keep it going is probably part of the fascination with me at this point, but I’m not going to play this one.
No. You tell me. I step closer to the glass, closer to him. I can’t seem to help it. I’m being pushed towards him by an invisible force. He shakes his head, lips curled upward as his eyes seem to scan me up and down. I want an answer.
Come inside and get it out of me. I won’t succumb to his flirtations, as much as I would like to do just what he’s asking me. I ignore it with my hands, though my smile seems to placate him just enough. He tilts forward, meeting my height with his own the way someone might lean down to kiss you, and does just that against the glass. Kissing it with puckered red lips and eyes closed for an instant. Kissing me.
You are crazy. He scares me like nothing else, but something…I have to fight the urge to like him. His calm demeanor in this nut house makes him personable and I’m just as crazy for believing he could be.
Yes. At least he’s not deluding himself.
You sign well.
So do you.
My mother was deaf.
So was your uncle.
My face must’ve fallen five feet to the floor. My throat plummeted into my stomach.
Ha ha. Even his signing appears cruel and manipulative. Only funny to him. I step back from the glass. I remember why he’s in here now. I was stupid for five minutes when he duped me into his little trap, baited so he could taunt me. Even behind locked doors, he’s a son of a bitch.
I turn away and walk down the empty hallway and when I’m sure I’m out of sight from him, I start running. I run as fast as my legs will take me out of the spiral hallways, down to the makeshift lobby and out the front door as easily as I came in. Though I arrived with certain fears and ran out with even more. I made a mistake. I’ve been making a lot lately when it comes to him. Moronic judgment calls, or lack thereof and the further away I get from him, the more regrettable they become and the more obvious my gullibility shines through. Where is my intellectual resolve when I’m around him? Even glass 5 inches thick can’t stop his permeation of my senses. Something is wrong with me. I should see a doctor. Tomorrow.
Chapter 3
Arkham is the last real homage to an older Gotham City. It’s been remodeled to suit the technological advancements such a place should be afforded, but its concept, its meaning, is much older than the physical structure itself. The circular construct is modernized, maybe even a little symbolic, meant to house thousands of rooms, one atop the other towards the sky to infinity. There have been times in the past where every room is full. There are times when only several of the vestibules secure a body and sometimes those are precarious in the best of situations because no matter how updated or reformed the building or its high-tech, new age-ey doctors become, escape is rampant. For some it’s a nightmare to be housed inside. For others, it’s just a vacation between indiscretions. For the question mark man in my current possession, it’s going to be like being bullied on the playground all over again.
“I don’t belong in here and you know it. I’ll be tortured. Beaten for no reason. Let that eat away at your conscience in the middle of the night!” I watch the guards take him away, down the brightly lit hallway that most notably resembles the doctor’s office. That of an ominous pathway towards an operating room, or even the morgue. Any place you don’t want to be in on hospital grounds. I wave in his wake.
“Bye, Eddie.” He disappears behind swinging doors, as if cooks pulling him towards the big kitchen to make Riddler stew, and I look around myself. Quiet. I’m in a lobby of sorts, if you could give such a place something as inappropriate as a waiting room. It’s a prison for psychopaths, not a place for visitors, though they acquire them on occasion. A dark hallway to my right, a dark hallway to my left, all curving into the labyrinth of circles that make its construct. It’s early. Only 1 a.m. and my com-link hasn’t made a peep since I informed B my operation was fulfilled, and I’m wide awake. Maybe I’ll take a walk.
Strange place for a stroll, but I’ve always been curious about Arkham. One of the infamous of its kind. There’s many like it across the country, but this one is special for housing some of the most wicked and vile. Sometimes they ship them out here like produce from other countries are imported. I’ve narrowly escaped wandering its woebegone hallways in the past. Now’s my chance to see it on friendly terms.
Impenetrable, bulletproof, hammer-proof, soundproof, anything-proof glass makes every detainee visible. Long gone are the days when steel doors with one little square in the middle to voice complaints kept these guys under lock and key. Too many people were escaping with too long a span of time between knowing and not knowing. With glass doors, all you have to do is look to see you’re standing in a pile of shit. Regular walk-throughs are performed twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, just to make sure anyone who should be there is accounted for. It makes sense, though all concept of privacy is extinct when you have a hallway with cells parallel to each other. I imagine John so-and-so isn’t too happy when he’s housed across someone like Two-Face or Joker, staring them down, but somehow the Constitution, basic human and civil rights, are exempt here. Void behind these doors and it’s not legal, but the powers that be turn their heads the other way, content to let it continue.
I start thinking about him as I walk the silent hallway. Most rooms are faintly lit, just enough that a midnight walk to perform a head count in the event of an emergency would be possible. Everyone asleep, just as they should be. I think about his sneering grin, barreling down on me. The eerie jade of his eyes, sparkling even without moonlight, like the possessed in need of an exorcism. Cell after cell, some habited, most not, passing me by as I take the scenic route. I don’t know how long I’ve been walking these halls, but I’m far from the exit and I start to creep myself out, holding my own waist to give myself comfort or some sense of protection. Passing empty cell after empty cell, thinking about all the animals out there that should be in here, filling these empty cages.
Then I see him.
He sees me first. I can tell he’s been looking at me for a couple seconds longer than I have him. Watching me as I wander aimlessly. The corner of his lips cracked upward, amused. Standing in the middle of his cell oddly, as if my presence has interrupted him in the middle of something, like pacing. A burning cigarette sitting between his white fingers, smoke swirling and rising towards his face like an eerie fog. I’m frozen. I don’t know what to do. I should turn around and walk away as if he doesn’t bother me. As if I’m not still thinking about him, but I can’t get him out of my head and here he is, materialized as reference to the face I see in my imagination every night. The face that makes my dreams so vivid and torturous because in them, I want him more than anything – just before waking in pouring sweat.
We stare at each other for a brief few seconds as if either of us can’t figure out what the other is doing in here. As if at a bar and suddenly bumping into each other after a long absence of acquaintance. Some bumping into. I think to look away, but his hands get my attention. Putting the cigarette between his red lips, his fingers move fluidly, quickly. He’s signing.
What are you doing? He smiles as if the curiosity of it is entertaining enough and the answer isn’t necessary.
Why are you awake? I’m trying to hide the look on my face that says I’m impressed. He signs as if second nature, another language, deaf himself.
Insomniac. He looks at me, waiting. This is the part where you answer my question.
Bringing in Riddler. It takes a second since I have to spell out each individual letter. He laughs aloud, though I can’t hear him. I wait until he’s looking at me again. Thought I would take a walk. I have yet to consider why I’m bothering telling him. Maybe the fact I’m free to wander is enough.
Funny place for a walk. His smile is somewhat contagious and I find I’m trying to fight wanting to keep this up. Figuratively speaking. I haven’t had a signing partner in over a decade.
I was thinking. Even behind the glass, however, he’s still frightening. It’s something about his face. Animated. It says so much and yet, he says nothing. It’s not curious, but knowing. As if he’s heard all about me, has me figured out and the look on his face says he’s not surprised.
About?
His signing – it’s…strange. Why would he know something like that?
None of your business. I try to appear annoyed he even thought to ask, as though I would tell him. I shouldn’t be divulging what I am already. But so much about me is revealed already. Just in the flick of my wrist, in the turn of my pinkie finger, in the hook of my thumbs as we communicate.
Thinking about me? His grin is becoming seductive, half-closed lids making bedroom eyes from behind the glass. Without a voice, without real words, he’s still getting to me. Giving yourself nightmares? I don’t answer him. I look away for a brief moment, letting the preparation of my signing hands fall to my sides, then place my arms around myself again as though a shy little girl, then look back, trying to get the strength to tell him off. This would be my chance. His hands start up again. Oh, I see. Not nightmares. He raises his eyebrows suggestively. Fantasies, maybe? He smiles and my grimace only exacerbates it. I’m not playing this game with him all over again. I have the will to end it. We’re not on the roof anymore and he’s not hovering over me like something primal from inside my psyche I just imagined to seduce me.
I wouldn’t waste my time. You’re not worth the effort. I realize I should be utilizing this rare moment to probe him. I rest my weight on my hip, changing position, changing demeanor, hopefully changing this conversation. How do you know my name? He chuckles, taking a puff from his cigarette.
Guess. He’s closer to the glass now as if baiting me, making me stay and talk to him. Keep him entertained because I’m sure that’s all I am. An amusement for his games. That I’m dumb enough to keep it going is probably part of the fascination with me at this point, but I’m not going to play this one.
No. You tell me. I step closer to the glass, closer to him. I can’t seem to help it. I’m being pushed towards him by an invisible force. He shakes his head, lips curled upward as his eyes seem to scan me up and down. I want an answer.
Come inside and get it out of me. I won’t succumb to his flirtations, as much as I would like to do just what he’s asking me. I ignore it with my hands, though my smile seems to placate him just enough. He tilts forward, meeting my height with his own the way someone might lean down to kiss you, and does just that against the glass. Kissing it with puckered red lips and eyes closed for an instant. Kissing me.
You are crazy. He scares me like nothing else, but something…I have to fight the urge to like him. His calm demeanor in this nut house makes him personable and I’m just as crazy for believing he could be.
Yes. At least he’s not deluding himself.
You sign well.
So do you.
My mother was deaf.
So was your uncle.
My face must’ve fallen five feet to the floor. My throat plummeted into my stomach.
Ha ha. Even his signing appears cruel and manipulative. Only funny to him. I step back from the glass. I remember why he’s in here now. I was stupid for five minutes when he duped me into his little trap, baited so he could taunt me. Even behind locked doors, he’s a son of a bitch.
I turn away and walk down the empty hallway and when I’m sure I’m out of sight from him, I start running. I run as fast as my legs will take me out of the spiral hallways, down to the makeshift lobby and out the front door as easily as I came in. Though I arrived with certain fears and ran out with even more. I made a mistake. I’ve been making a lot lately when it comes to him. Moronic judgment calls, or lack thereof and the further away I get from him, the more regrettable they become and the more obvious my gullibility shines through. Where is my intellectual resolve when I’m around him? Even glass 5 inches thick can’t stop his permeation of my senses. Something is wrong with me. I should see a doctor. Tomorrow.
Chapter 4
It's Chapter four that's the raunchy, screwed up chapter so if you read it (which I have NO CLUE if anyone actually is...I think I'm just doing this for my own fucking fun at this point...) then I wouldn't read this at work or anything...
Chapter 4
“Stop being so down on yourself.” Delilah. Dee. She’s my best friend. My only friend in this entire city. I’d holed myself up at the manor for so long, I’d ignored most of my other friends and lost many more acquaintances. She stuck it out. She still doesn’t know what I do, but she has her valid suspicions. When asked, I don’t lie. I omit.
“Sorry.” I sip my gin and tonic, cringing at the overpowering tingle of alcohol on my tongue. “Guess I’m not very good company.” The bar is quiet, the mood somber, which is perfect. To say I had personality right now would be like insinuating I thought Napoleon tall.
“What’s with you, Em?” She’s sipping something yellow and pink with an umbrella and a triangle of pineapple sticking out of it. She grips the glass at its middle where it curves inward like an hourglass, an exaggerated pin-up model, and sips through the straw. Her eyes don’t look away. Instead, they peer out of the corners, waiting for me to answer.
“Just…” A psychotic, homicidal clown in a suit is haunting me. That’s all. “Nothing. Something just spooked me the other day. Reminded me of…”
She laughs, snorts through her nostrils softly before turning away. “Tommy?”
I didn’t want her to say it aloud. “Just the whole life…”
“You can’t keep running away from it.” She’s shaking her head with that disappointed look, but I don’t want to have the conversation she’s about to initiate right now. “Eventually, you’re gonna’ have to…”
“Yea, yea, yea.” I blow her off like I tend to do when she brings it up. Instead, I kick out my stool, push my drink away as if irritated with its mere presence, and walk to the aisle beyond, towards the back where this bar, and every bar just like it with run down brown carpeting, broken and flickering lights, and caked on dirt walls have phone booths, a water fountain, and bathrooms. And, since we’re currently the only patrons, save for a one-eyed biker in a too tight tank bitching to the bartender, a place to be alone.
I take a few sips of water from the fountain before wiping my mouth with my palm, patting my dewy forehead with my fingers before turning around and almost jumping a mile in the air, almost screaming my head off, fighting the want to do both. Feel the immediate weight of a wrecking ball plummet to the depths of my bowels. The dryness of my throat becoming rather apparent, even after swigging water like a camel going through the Saharas.
“Joker.” I whisper it ever so slightly. How I kept from screaming, I couldn’t tell you. Turning around to see him leaning against the wall behind me as if patiently waiting, his white face so very visible, as if God himself were shining a celestial light.
“Hello darling. I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. I was a little…tied up.” He closes the gap between us quickly and it’s not fear, not loathing, not complete distaste for him that makes me back away. Lust. Desire. Wanting what I shouldn’t. These things keep me at bay. “I’ve been a naughty boy.” I must keep a strong and vigilant stance. I wield the symbol like a battleaxe. I can’t be seduced by simple temptations and I repeat this over and over, as if a rosary, a prayer, my mantra I must incessantly recite. To remind myself.
I can smell him this time. Some faint, traceable aroma about him that encompasses me on every side. Not something I can easily recognize. Not soap, or florals, or even a cologne I could name. Just what must be him and I shame myself because I inhaled as deeply as possible, filling my lungs with it, holding my breath just to secure it for a moment before exhaling. I open my eyes to stare into his green ones. Bright and menacing.
“What do you want?”
He leans in quite close, pressing against me and my only thought is to push my hands against his chest. Oppose him.
“I was just thinking…how much I enjoyed our little tryst.” His lips are hot against my cheek. Burning me.
“Perhaps you should practice…not thinking.” My fingers curl over the soft textile of his shirt, shining, opalescent buttons tempting me to follow their vertical descent downward to his vest. More buttons to finger. Make undone.
“Don’t you see I tried, my dear.” The low growl of his voice is soothing over my ear. Much different than the uppity, comical sing-song of days before. “I tried…to forget.” His index makes its acquaintance with my chin, trickling down my throat to my chest. He follows this particular trail with his eyes. Shadowed. Deep-set under a sadistic, exaggerated brow. The arches. They get my attention somehow. “I went about my day…easily enough...” The romance of the curve between each eyebrow, swooping upward, then cutting, shifting violently into a downward slope. “Pursued my ordinary hobbies…” Both sides exactly the same. “…but you were so very distracting…” Symmetrical. Even as he smiles, both sides cut into his face, the corners disrupt both cheeks perfectly. “That poor girl…” He laughs. “I have to admit…I did get a little excessive…a little…” I’m trying not to listen. Afraid of what he’s whispering, so very softly, just as a lover might. “…out of control.”
“What have you done?” Barely audible. My words trill from my lips as a slight sprinkling, a side note, a hint.
“But you see, you do that to me.” His lips skim just over my own. “I can’t concentrate.” The presence of his knee between my legs becomes noticeable. Spreading my thighs, his entire frame pressed against me that not even air could pass between us. “How do you expect me to…work…when I can’t concentrate?”
“Work?” I contemplate this word. Obviously, we are not talking about work in the real sense of work. What it means to go to work, to work, have work, a worker. The verb is almost ironic.
“Do you know what happens when I can’t concentrate?” I shake my head, sure as the sun rises at 6:30 a.m. I’m going to find out. “I get sloppy. Stagnant. Irate.” His lips continue to hover above mine. I want him to kiss me. I want it so badly, it’s all I can think about. “I can’t possibly…create…in such a state, as I’m sure you can imagine.” I can almost barely see the outline of someone such as himself perhaps tending to painstaking labors. Creating. Molding. A Jack the Ripper with a twist.
“How did you find me?” I’m hypnotized by him on some illogical plane of being. I’m removed from my body and I’m floating above my soulless form, detached, watching myself below. This soul must escape. It must hide for the time being. For the time I let this continue. It cannot listen. It cannot be seduced. I won’t let him have it.
“Not a feat, if you must know. Your…Bat…isn’t the only detective.” His nose, tickling the crook of my neck, smells me deeply. Takes in my scent and breathes it with satisfaction. “I know everything there is to know about you, darling.”
“Everything?” I shouldn’t have been so surprised. He only smiles a confident grin. I shouldn’t let him manipulate me the way he is. Getting under my skin with what are likely lies designed to deceive me. I’m sucked into his void of consciousness. Slow and steady. I’m letting him, and that’s what hurts more. Not the possibility another slaughtered, mauled Jane Doe will make her way into the morgue, which may or may not be true. Not that he’s revealing this information in cryptic flirtation. It’s that I’m enjoying this seduction.
“I must admit, some of your past…indiscretions, are quite impressive.” My God. I thought I’d terminated my file.
“How did you…?” I shake my head, so sure he must be lying. “But I…” He laughs. An abysmal, deathly chuckle. The kind of my nightmares. My fantasies.
“Please, don’t insult me.” Even B mumbled some annoyance on the amount of red tape necessary to procure a file on me. And even after all the effort, he came up with nothing. A clean slate. Maybe a parking ticket here and there. I covered every one of my tracks. “Armed robbery. Arson. Assault. Battery…I know each one. Alphabetically.” His smile makes an imprint on my chest as he repeats this list. “It’s my favorite bedtime story. I have to say I wasn’t surprised with a 187…” Police codes. Homicide. He kisses my clavicle. “…a 273…” Assault on a person. Another kiss. “…and a 288 all in one night.” Lewd conduct / Felony sex offense. “But, an 89. I think my memory is rusty…remind me?”
“Crime against nature.” I turn away from him. I’m not proud of my past, in any way. His laugh, however, is not unexpected.
“Is that how they classify corpses?” Another laugh. Really, they had to make up new numbers for me. I don’t even remember some of them now that I try to recall. I’ve pushed them so far from my memory they’re as distant as the rainforest, the ozone, the stars in the sky. “My my, you were a busy girl, weren’t you? How very sad.”
“I’m not that person anymore.” I say it sternly. With intention. I am not that person anymore.
“My point exactly. I quite admire your flair for the dramatic…the excessive.” A light and timid moan escapes from his throat as tender, blood red lips drift across my collar. “What beautiful music we could have made together.” Said as if he’s imagining it right this very instant and were this several years ago, I would’ve taken him up on his offer, if that is indeed what he’s intimating in his sly speech. It would’ve been my dream, an honor, to work with such a master. Slight remnants of the despicable me inside is even flattered, but I’m not that person anymore. I don’t think in those terms. I don’t even contemplate them in memories and I intend to keep it that way. “You and I…we’d have the Bat in stitches.”
“Is that all you want, a little attention from him?” I let his purple tie run through my fingers, pulling this beaming noose. The only splash of color on his entire ensemble.
His lips float over me, exhaling into my open mouth. “Oh, no, darling. I want all of the attention. Every…last…bit.”
“So what do you want with me?” I feel his breath crawling over my lips. Inhaling it through my mouth, filling my lungs with it. Making it part of me. “I can’t get you the attention you want. I’m…”I turn away, almost ashamed. In some twisted, upside down, corrupt way, I thought I might’ve been able to make this work in my favor. I am not above becoming a rat in order to do what I must. It’s not just part of the job. It’s part of my survival. “…I’m of no use to you.”
“But you are. Just look at you.” His smile is sinister. The way the corners of his mouth curl upward deviously. Always plotting. Always planning. “You’re mesmerized by me.” I want to hate him. His smile. It’s so evil and so very beautiful. Like a work of art, floating above me. Teasing me as he speaks deeply, penetrating me with words I loathe. Things I don’t want to hear about myself. They’re removing my clothes slowly, steadily with unjustified fingers and claws and talons like a rapist in an abandoned alleyway set on all sides by black shadows. I can’t speak. I can’t scream. It’s as if I’ve lost my voice box completely.
“You…intrigue me.” Biting my lip. I’m liquefied between my legs. “Something…I can’t put my finger on.” My digits I can’t utilize on him instead busy themselves with the wall behind me. Tickling me with its peach fuzz hair. Its pool table similarity. I could easily maneuver out of this and free myself of him, but I’m drawn like a magnet.
“Can’t…or…” My hand registers the creamy soft leather of his buttery white glove, leading my hand away from the safety of the wall, away from the closed space where I hide my values, and between the warmth of his legs. “…Won’t…?”
I don’t know if I’m in shock or surprise, or both. I don’t concern myself with the excruciatingly soft silk of his suit in my grasp, or the taint of his exhale on my vulnerable throat I bend backwards to make more available for his lips. I forget I was resisting him. How sad to forget a thing such as dire resistance to another person’s assault. To suddenly surrender instead. I’m split. I’m telling myself to stop this right now. Bring it to a close. Go no further and how easily I could do it. I’m also telling myself not to stop. To move this along. Make it my destiny to succumb to sexual onslaught by the Joker. To hear myself moan aloud, to gasp at his nibble on my neck, it’s as if it weren’t me at all, but me watching me in some severed dream.
“You’re coming with me.” He’s sure of it by the way he says it, a deep growl in my ear and I believe him. I am going with him. Wherever he goes, I want to be led to it. I would follow him for miles, watching his shoulders stretch out over the span of his back, behind him in my obedience. I would study his forceful gait as he walks. The spread of his legs in his stance. The severe V shape of his torso, from shoulders to waist, only to veer back out in reflection from waist to feet. The thick of his thighs, making their dense musculature known in stride. Pressing against cloth. Wanting out. Begging me to release them. Scratch my fingernails over them in lust. Then, I would see his profile. The gleam of white against his high cheekbones. The blink of an emerald eye as it glimpsed me over his shoulder. The slight upturn of crimson lips in the corner and as he led me through vast deserts and oceans, through thick forests and empty landscapes, parted seas and built arks, I would pray at his temple every night and ask for more.
Chapter 4
“Stop being so down on yourself.” Delilah. Dee. She’s my best friend. My only friend in this entire city. I’d holed myself up at the manor for so long, I’d ignored most of my other friends and lost many more acquaintances. She stuck it out. She still doesn’t know what I do, but she has her valid suspicions. When asked, I don’t lie. I omit.
“Sorry.” I sip my gin and tonic, cringing at the overpowering tingle of alcohol on my tongue. “Guess I’m not very good company.” The bar is quiet, the mood somber, which is perfect. To say I had personality right now would be like insinuating I thought Napoleon tall.
“What’s with you, Em?” She’s sipping something yellow and pink with an umbrella and a triangle of pineapple sticking out of it. She grips the glass at its middle where it curves inward like an hourglass, an exaggerated pin-up model, and sips through the straw. Her eyes don’t look away. Instead, they peer out of the corners, waiting for me to answer.
“Just…” A psychotic, homicidal clown in a suit is haunting me. That’s all. “Nothing. Something just spooked me the other day. Reminded me of…”
She laughs, snorts through her nostrils softly before turning away. “Tommy?”
I didn’t want her to say it aloud. “Just the whole life…”
“You can’t keep running away from it.” She’s shaking her head with that disappointed look, but I don’t want to have the conversation she’s about to initiate right now. “Eventually, you’re gonna’ have to…”
“Yea, yea, yea.” I blow her off like I tend to do when she brings it up. Instead, I kick out my stool, push my drink away as if irritated with its mere presence, and walk to the aisle beyond, towards the back where this bar, and every bar just like it with run down brown carpeting, broken and flickering lights, and caked on dirt walls have phone booths, a water fountain, and bathrooms. And, since we’re currently the only patrons, save for a one-eyed biker in a too tight tank bitching to the bartender, a place to be alone.
I take a few sips of water from the fountain before wiping my mouth with my palm, patting my dewy forehead with my fingers before turning around and almost jumping a mile in the air, almost screaming my head off, fighting the want to do both. Feel the immediate weight of a wrecking ball plummet to the depths of my bowels. The dryness of my throat becoming rather apparent, even after swigging water like a camel going through the Saharas.
“Joker.” I whisper it ever so slightly. How I kept from screaming, I couldn’t tell you. Turning around to see him leaning against the wall behind me as if patiently waiting, his white face so very visible, as if God himself were shining a celestial light.
“Hello darling. I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. I was a little…tied up.” He closes the gap between us quickly and it’s not fear, not loathing, not complete distaste for him that makes me back away. Lust. Desire. Wanting what I shouldn’t. These things keep me at bay. “I’ve been a naughty boy.” I must keep a strong and vigilant stance. I wield the symbol like a battleaxe. I can’t be seduced by simple temptations and I repeat this over and over, as if a rosary, a prayer, my mantra I must incessantly recite. To remind myself.
I can smell him this time. Some faint, traceable aroma about him that encompasses me on every side. Not something I can easily recognize. Not soap, or florals, or even a cologne I could name. Just what must be him and I shame myself because I inhaled as deeply as possible, filling my lungs with it, holding my breath just to secure it for a moment before exhaling. I open my eyes to stare into his green ones. Bright and menacing.
“What do you want?”
He leans in quite close, pressing against me and my only thought is to push my hands against his chest. Oppose him.
“I was just thinking…how much I enjoyed our little tryst.” His lips are hot against my cheek. Burning me.
“Perhaps you should practice…not thinking.” My fingers curl over the soft textile of his shirt, shining, opalescent buttons tempting me to follow their vertical descent downward to his vest. More buttons to finger. Make undone.
“Don’t you see I tried, my dear.” The low growl of his voice is soothing over my ear. Much different than the uppity, comical sing-song of days before. “I tried…to forget.” His index makes its acquaintance with my chin, trickling down my throat to my chest. He follows this particular trail with his eyes. Shadowed. Deep-set under a sadistic, exaggerated brow. The arches. They get my attention somehow. “I went about my day…easily enough...” The romance of the curve between each eyebrow, swooping upward, then cutting, shifting violently into a downward slope. “Pursued my ordinary hobbies…” Both sides exactly the same. “…but you were so very distracting…” Symmetrical. Even as he smiles, both sides cut into his face, the corners disrupt both cheeks perfectly. “That poor girl…” He laughs. “I have to admit…I did get a little excessive…a little…” I’m trying not to listen. Afraid of what he’s whispering, so very softly, just as a lover might. “…out of control.”
“What have you done?” Barely audible. My words trill from my lips as a slight sprinkling, a side note, a hint.
“But you see, you do that to me.” His lips skim just over my own. “I can’t concentrate.” The presence of his knee between my legs becomes noticeable. Spreading my thighs, his entire frame pressed against me that not even air could pass between us. “How do you expect me to…work…when I can’t concentrate?”
“Work?” I contemplate this word. Obviously, we are not talking about work in the real sense of work. What it means to go to work, to work, have work, a worker. The verb is almost ironic.
“Do you know what happens when I can’t concentrate?” I shake my head, sure as the sun rises at 6:30 a.m. I’m going to find out. “I get sloppy. Stagnant. Irate.” His lips continue to hover above mine. I want him to kiss me. I want it so badly, it’s all I can think about. “I can’t possibly…create…in such a state, as I’m sure you can imagine.” I can almost barely see the outline of someone such as himself perhaps tending to painstaking labors. Creating. Molding. A Jack the Ripper with a twist.
“How did you find me?” I’m hypnotized by him on some illogical plane of being. I’m removed from my body and I’m floating above my soulless form, detached, watching myself below. This soul must escape. It must hide for the time being. For the time I let this continue. It cannot listen. It cannot be seduced. I won’t let him have it.
“Not a feat, if you must know. Your…Bat…isn’t the only detective.” His nose, tickling the crook of my neck, smells me deeply. Takes in my scent and breathes it with satisfaction. “I know everything there is to know about you, darling.”
“Everything?” I shouldn’t have been so surprised. He only smiles a confident grin. I shouldn’t let him manipulate me the way he is. Getting under my skin with what are likely lies designed to deceive me. I’m sucked into his void of consciousness. Slow and steady. I’m letting him, and that’s what hurts more. Not the possibility another slaughtered, mauled Jane Doe will make her way into the morgue, which may or may not be true. Not that he’s revealing this information in cryptic flirtation. It’s that I’m enjoying this seduction.
“I must admit, some of your past…indiscretions, are quite impressive.” My God. I thought I’d terminated my file.
“How did you…?” I shake my head, so sure he must be lying. “But I…” He laughs. An abysmal, deathly chuckle. The kind of my nightmares. My fantasies.
“Please, don’t insult me.” Even B mumbled some annoyance on the amount of red tape necessary to procure a file on me. And even after all the effort, he came up with nothing. A clean slate. Maybe a parking ticket here and there. I covered every one of my tracks. “Armed robbery. Arson. Assault. Battery…I know each one. Alphabetically.” His smile makes an imprint on my chest as he repeats this list. “It’s my favorite bedtime story. I have to say I wasn’t surprised with a 187…” Police codes. Homicide. He kisses my clavicle. “…a 273…” Assault on a person. Another kiss. “…and a 288 all in one night.” Lewd conduct / Felony sex offense. “But, an 89. I think my memory is rusty…remind me?”
“Crime against nature.” I turn away from him. I’m not proud of my past, in any way. His laugh, however, is not unexpected.
“Is that how they classify corpses?” Another laugh. Really, they had to make up new numbers for me. I don’t even remember some of them now that I try to recall. I’ve pushed them so far from my memory they’re as distant as the rainforest, the ozone, the stars in the sky. “My my, you were a busy girl, weren’t you? How very sad.”
“I’m not that person anymore.” I say it sternly. With intention. I am not that person anymore.
“My point exactly. I quite admire your flair for the dramatic…the excessive.” A light and timid moan escapes from his throat as tender, blood red lips drift across my collar. “What beautiful music we could have made together.” Said as if he’s imagining it right this very instant and were this several years ago, I would’ve taken him up on his offer, if that is indeed what he’s intimating in his sly speech. It would’ve been my dream, an honor, to work with such a master. Slight remnants of the despicable me inside is even flattered, but I’m not that person anymore. I don’t think in those terms. I don’t even contemplate them in memories and I intend to keep it that way. “You and I…we’d have the Bat in stitches.”
“Is that all you want, a little attention from him?” I let his purple tie run through my fingers, pulling this beaming noose. The only splash of color on his entire ensemble.
His lips float over me, exhaling into my open mouth. “Oh, no, darling. I want all of the attention. Every…last…bit.”
“So what do you want with me?” I feel his breath crawling over my lips. Inhaling it through my mouth, filling my lungs with it. Making it part of me. “I can’t get you the attention you want. I’m…”I turn away, almost ashamed. In some twisted, upside down, corrupt way, I thought I might’ve been able to make this work in my favor. I am not above becoming a rat in order to do what I must. It’s not just part of the job. It’s part of my survival. “…I’m of no use to you.”
“But you are. Just look at you.” His smile is sinister. The way the corners of his mouth curl upward deviously. Always plotting. Always planning. “You’re mesmerized by me.” I want to hate him. His smile. It’s so evil and so very beautiful. Like a work of art, floating above me. Teasing me as he speaks deeply, penetrating me with words I loathe. Things I don’t want to hear about myself. They’re removing my clothes slowly, steadily with unjustified fingers and claws and talons like a rapist in an abandoned alleyway set on all sides by black shadows. I can’t speak. I can’t scream. It’s as if I’ve lost my voice box completely.
“You…intrigue me.” Biting my lip. I’m liquefied between my legs. “Something…I can’t put my finger on.” My digits I can’t utilize on him instead busy themselves with the wall behind me. Tickling me with its peach fuzz hair. Its pool table similarity. I could easily maneuver out of this and free myself of him, but I’m drawn like a magnet.
“Can’t…or…” My hand registers the creamy soft leather of his buttery white glove, leading my hand away from the safety of the wall, away from the closed space where I hide my values, and between the warmth of his legs. “…Won’t…?”
I don’t know if I’m in shock or surprise, or both. I don’t concern myself with the excruciatingly soft silk of his suit in my grasp, or the taint of his exhale on my vulnerable throat I bend backwards to make more available for his lips. I forget I was resisting him. How sad to forget a thing such as dire resistance to another person’s assault. To suddenly surrender instead. I’m split. I’m telling myself to stop this right now. Bring it to a close. Go no further and how easily I could do it. I’m also telling myself not to stop. To move this along. Make it my destiny to succumb to sexual onslaught by the Joker. To hear myself moan aloud, to gasp at his nibble on my neck, it’s as if it weren’t me at all, but me watching me in some severed dream.
“You’re coming with me.” He’s sure of it by the way he says it, a deep growl in my ear and I believe him. I am going with him. Wherever he goes, I want to be led to it. I would follow him for miles, watching his shoulders stretch out over the span of his back, behind him in my obedience. I would study his forceful gait as he walks. The spread of his legs in his stance. The severe V shape of his torso, from shoulders to waist, only to veer back out in reflection from waist to feet. The thick of his thighs, making their dense musculature known in stride. Pressing against cloth. Wanting out. Begging me to release them. Scratch my fingernails over them in lust. Then, I would see his profile. The gleam of white against his high cheekbones. The blink of an emerald eye as it glimpsed me over his shoulder. The slight upturn of crimson lips in the corner and as he led me through vast deserts and oceans, through thick forests and empty landscapes, parted seas and built arks, I would pray at his temple every night and ask for more.
............. Yeah... Scary.
But then again, something has to draw in Harley Quinn. I just find it odd that one of the Bat Family is falling for this.
But then again, something has to draw in Harley Quinn. I just find it odd that one of the Bat Family is falling for this.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
LadyTevar wrote:............. Yeah... Scary.
But then again, something has to draw in Harley Quinn. I just find it odd that one of the Bat Family is falling for this.
I suppose that's my character's flaw. She's not really part of the family. I think she wishes she really could be...and tries wholeheartedly, but just isn't made to be in the Bat family. And the Joker is intelligent enough to see that about her.
What I question about my own story is why Batman hasn't seen it first and made her a member to begin with...I think I made Batman give her too much of the benefit of the doubt...but it's my story, not DC's, so I'm gonna make the Joker persevere where the Bat fails cause that's fun for me. Makes it different.
Chapter 5
My fave...though probably not anyone else's...DEFINATELY too perverse to read where someone might be looking over your shoulder...unless, you like that sorta thing...
Chapter 5
“What does everyone call you?” It’s quiet as the weight of my words fall over us. Curled beside him on the hotel bed, though it could be mistaken for a halfway house. Empty, dilapidated hallways, torn and shredded woodwork. Nothing occupied the actual room save for a wall heater and the bed we laid on.
“Have you forgotten already?” He smiles, glancing from the ceiling to me. “I shouldn’t have strangled you so hard.” My neck is sore. There will be residual bruises tomorrow, but much like a good soreness after sex, I’ll wake tomorrow and admire them with pleasure, or so I tell myself reluctantly.
“No. I mean, Joker, Mister J…” I smile as I say them. So strange to be speaking them out loud without animosity driving their vociferation and not having an angry Bruce to receive them. “Does anyone ever just call you J?” I typically piss on convention and attempt to find my own way in this world. To take a name, chop it up, throw it in the blender, allow the whipping spastic blade to cremate it, only to pour it out as something more pliable and hope it will help me discover who he is within me. Who he’ll be to me in future events as I fondly remember this moment. So relaxed. Elated and feeling that euphoric, after-sex high. Sliding my leg casually up and down his own as his fingers tickle my hip, playfully. Fear. Anxiety. These things don’t concern me anymore.
“No.” I’m rolled onto my back, his body falling between my open legs. “But you can call me whatever you want.” Kissing my throat with those mesmerizing lips of his that make me ultimately stupid. As if drugged.
“What if I called you an asshole?”
“You wouldn’t be the first.” As tempting as it is to remain, kissing, rolling around on the bed, screwing his brains out, I know this needs to end. I need to return to the space of reality. Where I’m a good guy and he’s a bad one, and we fight in a black and white world, rules unbreakable to guide us. Not like this, not where these rules are suddenly blurred and the territory is tricky. Unless I’m not meant to leave this room ever again.
“You’re gonna’ kill me, aren’t you?” I imagine it in my mind like a movie. His hands clenching my throat, straddling my twisting body as I attempt to fend him off. So very stupid to be so easily led to this point. But then again, I’m not entirely convinced I was led here at all.
I didn’t come to this city looking to be a hero or a vigilante, or even a cop. I didn’t come with deluded intuition about cleaning up the streets of its crime. I came to make it. I grew up in California, but like any other rich family, we traveled extensively. All over the world, in fact. By the time I was 16, I’d been to every major country on vacation at least once. However, the Middle East in summertime is not the ideal beach resort kind of place, but my dad insisted we see the world, that I be cultured. That I understand how bad other kids had it in the other parts of the world. The uncivilized, uneducated, and the un-industrialized nations needed my sympathy and my dad was going to assure he got it out of me.
We were rich, but I never saw a penny of it. My dad was what most would refer to as a ‘tightwad.’ We weren’t rich because he was successful, although he was. We weren’t rich because we came into a lot of money. We were rich because my dad hoarded it, locked it away from daylight and pinched every little piece he could. All of my clothes were hand-me-downs from other relatives, cousins mostly. I didn’t have any other siblings. Well, I did. I had an older sister. Two years older than me, but she died when I was very little. So little that I just as soon act as though I were an only sibling than give her much pause for consideration. We barely knew each other. We didn’t have a tight relationship, even as a baby, and I don’t remember knowing much about her or even hearing any mention of her after she passed so sometimes I forget.
I can’t say what spurned my hatred for life. For my boredom of it. Days seemed to pass similarly to me without any excitement, or even a little difference. Get up. Go to school. Come home. Do homework. Eat dinner. Go to bed. Get up. Do it again. Yawn. It was when I was in 5th grade, I met Tommy. Tommy Sims. Just moved in around the corner from me, but I met him in class. Sitting behind me, he kicked my chair for an entire day until I turned around and punched him in the face for it. My little kid punch, right in his nose. I sent him to the nurse, but we were just kids. Had I hit an adult, it might’ve resembled a flea bite. He was gone the entire length of lunchtime, sitting in the nurse’s office while they tried to stop his bloody nose, sending him back when the hour was up with tissue sticking out of his nostrils and tears streaked his dirty brown cheeks. They made me apologize. I did, hesitantly. But we shook little kid hands and promised to behave. We didn’t mean it. It was war.
It started with little things. He’d put a cockroach in my lunch bag when I wasn’t looking. I put snails in his backpack so they’d leave sticky snail trails all over his stuff, not to mention the smushed snails themselves after being carted around all day. He’d put spitballs in my hair, spill things on my clothes. Step on my feet. It started to escalate. I cut his hair once with dull scissors during craft time. He started to steal my homework. I remember the day I put dirt in his thermos of soup when his back was turned. I’d carried it around all day in my pocket, a nice big hunk of dirt that made the most perfect mud when coagulating in a warm, steaming thermos a couple of hours before lunch. I remember watching him open his thermos and cringe, looking up at me as I laughed. He just dug his spoon in the dirt and ate it, as if to spite me. After that day, I had a new appreciation for Tommy Sims.
It got worse before it got better. In middle school, he’d make deals with bigger girls, girls in higher grades, to beat me up by the bleachers. I got other boys to pee on him in the bathroom in exchange for hand-jobs. I was willing to do what it took to teach him I was better, that I was more resourceful. Superglue on his locker handle got me itching powder in mine. Inside every single book so it poured out over me when I extracted them. He lied in wait to watch the defining moment when I was rolling around on the hallway floor, crying with wet, red eyes it itched so bad. But he just laughed. It continued for years, though after a while it seemed as if the point wasn’t to prove who was better. The torture seemed to be the point. It had to come to a head, eventually.
He smiles above me. Both snow white hands cup my cheeks with a gentle caress and I’m wondering if this is it. When he snaps my neck with those beautiful, soft hands and I’ll just be the mutilated Jane Doe on her way to the mortuary.
“I can’t deny the thought crossed my mind. You’ve made it so very easy.” His deep, rumbling voice should be a warning. I should’ve listened to my instincts earlier and not made this so very easy for him. “What a tragedy to put such skill to sleep.”
He kisses my neck, my throat, my jaw line softly, running its length to my earlobe in considerate devouring. I feel him hard between my legs and though I told myself I was going to end this, figure a graceful way to bow out, I can’t resist him. I know what’s coming and I want it more than anything. Even after, when he’s already inside me, rocking my hips as he thrusts, I crave it.
Kissing me, his lips opening to breathe over my panting, he speaks in whispers. “Sadly…I can’t…end your life.” Inching words between gasps and moans. “Not this way.”
“Why?” I want him talking to me while we fuck. It doesn’t matter what it’s about. Context is irrelevant. I just want his voice washing over me in synchronicity. I don’t care we’re discussing my death. Or that it’s sad he can’t will it.
“You and I are the same.” Our kissing is that of ravenous, starved animals, prepared to ingest each other for sustenance. “Yours…will be such a beautiful death.” He rolls me on top of him as easily as if I were a toy doll. A plastic piece of nothing, riding him steadily. His fingers trail up my abdomen with leaden strokes, the middle of my belly where everything within me collides, as if slowing time itself. “Taking it will be an honor.” I see everything in slow motion. The tick of the clock as one arm brushes past the other. The pouring rain, cascading over fogging and cracked windows. The rise and fall of his chest as he pants. “But not…before I’m done with you.” I watch his eyes shut as he moans through clenched teeth. Bites his bottom lip that might be red were it not already so.
“And…when you are…?” My little groans coagulate with his deep and rupturing ones. Perfectly creating one cohesive note between the two of us. It’s beautiful.
“Then we’ll talk.” I don’t take offense this time. It doesn’t bother me he’s so very arrogant he assumes my life is negotiable. Making plans about my demise as I sit astride him, hips veering forward and back, fluidly to imaginary time. “For now…” His thumb slips between my legs as if rehearsed. Perfectly timed that I feel my orgasm culminating with the first stroke. “…don’t worry.”
I was 15, Tommy had to be 16. Just a little older than me, but not by much. I was smart, so I’d actually skipped a grade in elementary school, before I ever met him. I was always smaller than everyone because of it, but I filled out when I was 15. I didn’t care that my breasts were larger than everyone’s or that I had hips like a 20 year old, or even an ass like an adult. It helped me utilize my body for other means, to get what I wanted. It was just a tool. A bargaining chip. Boys wanted to jiggle my breasts between their stupid faces, fine. But they had to torture Tommy Sims to get it.
I took the hall pass to go to the bathroom. We had class across from each other and both sat by the door so we could make inappropriate hand gestures to each other and curse in sign language. Joker was right. Both my mom and uncle were deaf. Tommy’s dad was also deaf and had heard my mom was one of the leading authorities on everything relating to deaf culture. She’d written several books and apparently, his dad was a deaf educator with his heart set on starting his own school in California. He’d tracked down my mom in the hopes of getting her help so for all of this torture Tommy and I spawned on each other, there were infinite times when we had to pretend to be friends for the sake of our parents. We were getting really good at it and it almost played into the fun of our mutual taunting.
This particular afternoon, it reached its climax. He followed me to the bathroom without my knowledge. Slammed me into the tiled wall of the girls’ lavatory, splitting my lip and cutting my eyebrow in the process. I didn’t have time to retaliate. He restrained me before I could turn around to face him, blood running down my face and into my nostrils as he tore my panties from under my skirt, leaving me bruised around my legs where the material pulled and yanked from resistance. He forced my legs apart with his own and fucked me right there. I was in shock, really. Not from the actual rape because as this point in time, I’d already been fantasizing about it. I wanted it, I just never thought he had the balls to go through with it. That was the shocking part.
Eventually we started making plans to meet up. Secretively. In the locker rooms during the teacher’s lunch period, we’d fuck in the showers. He’d turn the hot water on all the way until it burned, running down my naked back as I came. It gave me blisters for days. We’d sneak into shop class after school and play with the toys, cutting each other up like Frankenstein’s, then cauterizing the wounds. The weekends were the best times because we’d have either of our houses to ourselves. My dad was often gone doing I don’t know what. Whatever rich tightwads do while my mom was busy sleeping with Tommy’s dad. Sometimes we spent the days torturing each other with new and inventive ideas. Melted butter on our wood stairs was a good one. I slipped the entire way, gave myself a concussion and I was lucky it was all I got. But most mornings I woke with a tickle of his tongue on my feet, forcing my giggle before slipping under my covers and taking advantage of me. Sometimes it was sweet, succulent like it probably is supposed to be. Others it was just another way to inflict pain. Either way, we couldn’t stop. We were addicted to each other and it snowballed quickly.
Soon we weren’t torturing each other as much as we were other people. Strangers on the street. Little kids we hated. Other bullies at school. We finally pooled our resources and became a force. By the time I was 17, I believed I’d already killed a girl, though I couldn’t be sure. Not directly killed her, but inadvertently. She just sort of vanished one day. Maybe I’m wrong and her parents moved away, didn’t leave any forwarding information and disappeared off the face of the earth. Rumor was she hung herself in her shower and the parents wanted to keep it very hush hush since her father was the local pastor and must’ve been reeling that his precious daughter would rather spend an eternity in Hell than live in this one on earth. This reality didn’t curb us. We only laughed and tried harder.
Something happened the summer I turned 18. Tommy moved away abruptly. After he left, after his last day when we locked ourselves in his room for the last time and made love all night, I was sorry I hadn’t gone with him. I’d gotten so wrapped up in the terrible things we were doing and how easily we could disrupt an entire town without anyone catching us, I never realized I fell in love with him. That I always had been and he with me. We adored each other, were in awe of each other. Our tortures weren’t enacted to really hurt, though they absolutely did, but to impress each other. When I put dirt in his soup that day, it wasn’t to hurt him. It was for him. To show him I was worthy. He ate it to show me he liked it, and to keep it coming.
The summer he left, I took to being bad full time. It was also the summer my dad died. They told me it was a fishing accident, but I later found out he was drowned. They never found out by who, though I have my suspicions. Too many coincidences that summer. My mom had secretly filed for divorce before Tommy and his dad took off. My dad came up dead. My mom went crazy and ended up in a loony bin upstate somewhere. I just got thrown into the world all at once with nothing. My dad had spent our fortune on gambling and whores. He was just about to file for bankruptcy before he passed so I was broke. I hadn’t been making friends, just enemies, so I didn’t have anyone to turn to. It really gave me a chance to utilize my talent.
I did all of the normal things to survive. I stole, I broke into homes, I squatted in abandoned buildings. I was pretty content, actually, just doing what I wanted. I became somewhat of a nomad, moving up from Santa Cruz to Oakland where I knew the real crime was happening. I had hoped I could somehow seep in with all of the other reprobates and no one would be the wiser, but I got picked up for loitering. Something really stupid and easy. Something I could’ve avoided. I had just started playing with homemade bombs around that time and was getting pretty skilled with a knife. I practiced on the cadavers on the Stanford campus for a couple months before I was outted by a guard who got tired of fucking me and decided he wanted to be a ‘good husband,’ whatever that meant. There were a million other things they could’ve gotten me for, but I let them pick me up for loitering. It was stupid.
At the police department, they processed me and threw me in with a bunch of hookers and drunks. I wasn’t scared really, just of being in a new place, but not scared of these people. It wasn’t long before I saw a face I recognized, smiling at me on the other side of the bars.
Tommy. In a cop’s uniform as if it were Halloween, but it was real. He was a cop. Oakland PD and he got me out of there so fast it would’ve made anyone’s head spin. He took me to his place and I spent the night. We talked all night between the times we made love, trying to fill in the gaps of time we’d missed with each other. He’d enrolled in college the summer he left and was some sort of criminal justice whiz. He took to it like a fish in water. He’d found his calling, he said. I was happy for him.
I told him my story. We hadn’t seen each other for I don't know how many years. I told him I’d been in love with him for a long time and had been sorry he left. He reciprocated, but we knew it was too late. That moment when we could’ve been together had already passed. We were obviously two different people on two different paths. I suppose I could’ve cleaned up my act, been the perfect little housewife for him and had a normal, everyday life where time passes similarly and individual days and weeks and months mold together into one long boring day. But I knew I had more to do. I wasn’t done and he understood. He kept my record clean. Ditched the loitering charge for me. Anything I needed, he said I could count on him and he kept his word.
But that was almost ten years ago. I wasn’t there – in that moment – anymore. Instead, I was in a disheveled hotel room where only the light from a flickering street lamp illuminated us on the catastrophe of a bed. Where I was remembering details I’d thought I’d forgotten, blocked out, and as I lean back, stretch out, never miss a beat, I remember those days vividly.
He occupies the open space I just created, vertical, but only for a moment before leaning over my curved torso and dragging his wet bottom lip up my sternum. Tongue on my nipple, biting, pinching, releasing. Never letting up the stroke of his fingers, the draw of his other hand on my hips, pulling me deeper into his lap in one of the best fucks I’ve had in so long I can’t remember. Maybe I take that back. Maybe I can remember after all.
* * * *
Something about my apartment at two in the afternoon is very specific. I don’t need a clock to tell me what time it is. Only the hazy glow over stunted orange paint, cracking infinitely in all directions. I focus in on it, much the same way anxiety makes you hone in on those little holes in the ceiling of a dentist’s office, just as he’s about to drill. You count each hole, hoping that by the time you’ve secured the numerical content of holes, he’ll be done.
I don’t remember how I got here. How I ended up on my couch, fully dressed, though precariously enough as if I had been drunk when doing it. I sit up and try to remember what happened. It feels as if it were all a fuzzy dream, hardly palpable, only traces floating through my head. Feeling my headache, I rub my forehead before gripping my neck and I remember. Heat pumping between my legs. Sweat beading on my skin. The taste of his tongue in my mouth and I remember all of it vividly as if repressed memories suddenly made known. They don’t feel like mine. It’s impossible.
I run to the bathroom just in time to throw up. Let the blood rush to my head for a good few seconds before I press repeat, play it over and over like a broken record. God. What have I done? Leaning over the sink as I catch my breath, I look into the cabinet mirror. No. It’s real. The bruises on my neck are very real. Cuts up and down my chest and arms are dry, red scrapes I begin to flush with warm water and a little bit of soap. His nails. I can feel them on me right now as I dress the wounds he inflicted. Sharp, scathing nails digging into my flesh like safety pins dragging their dull needles lifelessly. Making me feel. Leaving his mark so I won’t forget. So I would have this moment in the morning and remember him repeatedly. Every time I glide a tender finger over the raised, agitated skin, I’ll think of him and what I’ve done. A scab, a wound gouged, a piece of me taken from the fiber of my being and what I thought was someone with morals, with virtue, with steadfast determination to eradicate the filth in this town. Instead, I have become it, been reminded of it. Of me.
I throw up again.
Chapter 5
“What does everyone call you?” It’s quiet as the weight of my words fall over us. Curled beside him on the hotel bed, though it could be mistaken for a halfway house. Empty, dilapidated hallways, torn and shredded woodwork. Nothing occupied the actual room save for a wall heater and the bed we laid on.
“Have you forgotten already?” He smiles, glancing from the ceiling to me. “I shouldn’t have strangled you so hard.” My neck is sore. There will be residual bruises tomorrow, but much like a good soreness after sex, I’ll wake tomorrow and admire them with pleasure, or so I tell myself reluctantly.
“No. I mean, Joker, Mister J…” I smile as I say them. So strange to be speaking them out loud without animosity driving their vociferation and not having an angry Bruce to receive them. “Does anyone ever just call you J?” I typically piss on convention and attempt to find my own way in this world. To take a name, chop it up, throw it in the blender, allow the whipping spastic blade to cremate it, only to pour it out as something more pliable and hope it will help me discover who he is within me. Who he’ll be to me in future events as I fondly remember this moment. So relaxed. Elated and feeling that euphoric, after-sex high. Sliding my leg casually up and down his own as his fingers tickle my hip, playfully. Fear. Anxiety. These things don’t concern me anymore.
“No.” I’m rolled onto my back, his body falling between my open legs. “But you can call me whatever you want.” Kissing my throat with those mesmerizing lips of his that make me ultimately stupid. As if drugged.
“What if I called you an asshole?”
“You wouldn’t be the first.” As tempting as it is to remain, kissing, rolling around on the bed, screwing his brains out, I know this needs to end. I need to return to the space of reality. Where I’m a good guy and he’s a bad one, and we fight in a black and white world, rules unbreakable to guide us. Not like this, not where these rules are suddenly blurred and the territory is tricky. Unless I’m not meant to leave this room ever again.
“You’re gonna’ kill me, aren’t you?” I imagine it in my mind like a movie. His hands clenching my throat, straddling my twisting body as I attempt to fend him off. So very stupid to be so easily led to this point. But then again, I’m not entirely convinced I was led here at all.
I didn’t come to this city looking to be a hero or a vigilante, or even a cop. I didn’t come with deluded intuition about cleaning up the streets of its crime. I came to make it. I grew up in California, but like any other rich family, we traveled extensively. All over the world, in fact. By the time I was 16, I’d been to every major country on vacation at least once. However, the Middle East in summertime is not the ideal beach resort kind of place, but my dad insisted we see the world, that I be cultured. That I understand how bad other kids had it in the other parts of the world. The uncivilized, uneducated, and the un-industrialized nations needed my sympathy and my dad was going to assure he got it out of me.
We were rich, but I never saw a penny of it. My dad was what most would refer to as a ‘tightwad.’ We weren’t rich because he was successful, although he was. We weren’t rich because we came into a lot of money. We were rich because my dad hoarded it, locked it away from daylight and pinched every little piece he could. All of my clothes were hand-me-downs from other relatives, cousins mostly. I didn’t have any other siblings. Well, I did. I had an older sister. Two years older than me, but she died when I was very little. So little that I just as soon act as though I were an only sibling than give her much pause for consideration. We barely knew each other. We didn’t have a tight relationship, even as a baby, and I don’t remember knowing much about her or even hearing any mention of her after she passed so sometimes I forget.
I can’t say what spurned my hatred for life. For my boredom of it. Days seemed to pass similarly to me without any excitement, or even a little difference. Get up. Go to school. Come home. Do homework. Eat dinner. Go to bed. Get up. Do it again. Yawn. It was when I was in 5th grade, I met Tommy. Tommy Sims. Just moved in around the corner from me, but I met him in class. Sitting behind me, he kicked my chair for an entire day until I turned around and punched him in the face for it. My little kid punch, right in his nose. I sent him to the nurse, but we were just kids. Had I hit an adult, it might’ve resembled a flea bite. He was gone the entire length of lunchtime, sitting in the nurse’s office while they tried to stop his bloody nose, sending him back when the hour was up with tissue sticking out of his nostrils and tears streaked his dirty brown cheeks. They made me apologize. I did, hesitantly. But we shook little kid hands and promised to behave. We didn’t mean it. It was war.
It started with little things. He’d put a cockroach in my lunch bag when I wasn’t looking. I put snails in his backpack so they’d leave sticky snail trails all over his stuff, not to mention the smushed snails themselves after being carted around all day. He’d put spitballs in my hair, spill things on my clothes. Step on my feet. It started to escalate. I cut his hair once with dull scissors during craft time. He started to steal my homework. I remember the day I put dirt in his thermos of soup when his back was turned. I’d carried it around all day in my pocket, a nice big hunk of dirt that made the most perfect mud when coagulating in a warm, steaming thermos a couple of hours before lunch. I remember watching him open his thermos and cringe, looking up at me as I laughed. He just dug his spoon in the dirt and ate it, as if to spite me. After that day, I had a new appreciation for Tommy Sims.
It got worse before it got better. In middle school, he’d make deals with bigger girls, girls in higher grades, to beat me up by the bleachers. I got other boys to pee on him in the bathroom in exchange for hand-jobs. I was willing to do what it took to teach him I was better, that I was more resourceful. Superglue on his locker handle got me itching powder in mine. Inside every single book so it poured out over me when I extracted them. He lied in wait to watch the defining moment when I was rolling around on the hallway floor, crying with wet, red eyes it itched so bad. But he just laughed. It continued for years, though after a while it seemed as if the point wasn’t to prove who was better. The torture seemed to be the point. It had to come to a head, eventually.
He smiles above me. Both snow white hands cup my cheeks with a gentle caress and I’m wondering if this is it. When he snaps my neck with those beautiful, soft hands and I’ll just be the mutilated Jane Doe on her way to the mortuary.
“I can’t deny the thought crossed my mind. You’ve made it so very easy.” His deep, rumbling voice should be a warning. I should’ve listened to my instincts earlier and not made this so very easy for him. “What a tragedy to put such skill to sleep.”
He kisses my neck, my throat, my jaw line softly, running its length to my earlobe in considerate devouring. I feel him hard between my legs and though I told myself I was going to end this, figure a graceful way to bow out, I can’t resist him. I know what’s coming and I want it more than anything. Even after, when he’s already inside me, rocking my hips as he thrusts, I crave it.
Kissing me, his lips opening to breathe over my panting, he speaks in whispers. “Sadly…I can’t…end your life.” Inching words between gasps and moans. “Not this way.”
“Why?” I want him talking to me while we fuck. It doesn’t matter what it’s about. Context is irrelevant. I just want his voice washing over me in synchronicity. I don’t care we’re discussing my death. Or that it’s sad he can’t will it.
“You and I are the same.” Our kissing is that of ravenous, starved animals, prepared to ingest each other for sustenance. “Yours…will be such a beautiful death.” He rolls me on top of him as easily as if I were a toy doll. A plastic piece of nothing, riding him steadily. His fingers trail up my abdomen with leaden strokes, the middle of my belly where everything within me collides, as if slowing time itself. “Taking it will be an honor.” I see everything in slow motion. The tick of the clock as one arm brushes past the other. The pouring rain, cascading over fogging and cracked windows. The rise and fall of his chest as he pants. “But not…before I’m done with you.” I watch his eyes shut as he moans through clenched teeth. Bites his bottom lip that might be red were it not already so.
“And…when you are…?” My little groans coagulate with his deep and rupturing ones. Perfectly creating one cohesive note between the two of us. It’s beautiful.
“Then we’ll talk.” I don’t take offense this time. It doesn’t bother me he’s so very arrogant he assumes my life is negotiable. Making plans about my demise as I sit astride him, hips veering forward and back, fluidly to imaginary time. “For now…” His thumb slips between my legs as if rehearsed. Perfectly timed that I feel my orgasm culminating with the first stroke. “…don’t worry.”
I was 15, Tommy had to be 16. Just a little older than me, but not by much. I was smart, so I’d actually skipped a grade in elementary school, before I ever met him. I was always smaller than everyone because of it, but I filled out when I was 15. I didn’t care that my breasts were larger than everyone’s or that I had hips like a 20 year old, or even an ass like an adult. It helped me utilize my body for other means, to get what I wanted. It was just a tool. A bargaining chip. Boys wanted to jiggle my breasts between their stupid faces, fine. But they had to torture Tommy Sims to get it.
I took the hall pass to go to the bathroom. We had class across from each other and both sat by the door so we could make inappropriate hand gestures to each other and curse in sign language. Joker was right. Both my mom and uncle were deaf. Tommy’s dad was also deaf and had heard my mom was one of the leading authorities on everything relating to deaf culture. She’d written several books and apparently, his dad was a deaf educator with his heart set on starting his own school in California. He’d tracked down my mom in the hopes of getting her help so for all of this torture Tommy and I spawned on each other, there were infinite times when we had to pretend to be friends for the sake of our parents. We were getting really good at it and it almost played into the fun of our mutual taunting.
This particular afternoon, it reached its climax. He followed me to the bathroom without my knowledge. Slammed me into the tiled wall of the girls’ lavatory, splitting my lip and cutting my eyebrow in the process. I didn’t have time to retaliate. He restrained me before I could turn around to face him, blood running down my face and into my nostrils as he tore my panties from under my skirt, leaving me bruised around my legs where the material pulled and yanked from resistance. He forced my legs apart with his own and fucked me right there. I was in shock, really. Not from the actual rape because as this point in time, I’d already been fantasizing about it. I wanted it, I just never thought he had the balls to go through with it. That was the shocking part.
Eventually we started making plans to meet up. Secretively. In the locker rooms during the teacher’s lunch period, we’d fuck in the showers. He’d turn the hot water on all the way until it burned, running down my naked back as I came. It gave me blisters for days. We’d sneak into shop class after school and play with the toys, cutting each other up like Frankenstein’s, then cauterizing the wounds. The weekends were the best times because we’d have either of our houses to ourselves. My dad was often gone doing I don’t know what. Whatever rich tightwads do while my mom was busy sleeping with Tommy’s dad. Sometimes we spent the days torturing each other with new and inventive ideas. Melted butter on our wood stairs was a good one. I slipped the entire way, gave myself a concussion and I was lucky it was all I got. But most mornings I woke with a tickle of his tongue on my feet, forcing my giggle before slipping under my covers and taking advantage of me. Sometimes it was sweet, succulent like it probably is supposed to be. Others it was just another way to inflict pain. Either way, we couldn’t stop. We were addicted to each other and it snowballed quickly.
Soon we weren’t torturing each other as much as we were other people. Strangers on the street. Little kids we hated. Other bullies at school. We finally pooled our resources and became a force. By the time I was 17, I believed I’d already killed a girl, though I couldn’t be sure. Not directly killed her, but inadvertently. She just sort of vanished one day. Maybe I’m wrong and her parents moved away, didn’t leave any forwarding information and disappeared off the face of the earth. Rumor was she hung herself in her shower and the parents wanted to keep it very hush hush since her father was the local pastor and must’ve been reeling that his precious daughter would rather spend an eternity in Hell than live in this one on earth. This reality didn’t curb us. We only laughed and tried harder.
Something happened the summer I turned 18. Tommy moved away abruptly. After he left, after his last day when we locked ourselves in his room for the last time and made love all night, I was sorry I hadn’t gone with him. I’d gotten so wrapped up in the terrible things we were doing and how easily we could disrupt an entire town without anyone catching us, I never realized I fell in love with him. That I always had been and he with me. We adored each other, were in awe of each other. Our tortures weren’t enacted to really hurt, though they absolutely did, but to impress each other. When I put dirt in his soup that day, it wasn’t to hurt him. It was for him. To show him I was worthy. He ate it to show me he liked it, and to keep it coming.
The summer he left, I took to being bad full time. It was also the summer my dad died. They told me it was a fishing accident, but I later found out he was drowned. They never found out by who, though I have my suspicions. Too many coincidences that summer. My mom had secretly filed for divorce before Tommy and his dad took off. My dad came up dead. My mom went crazy and ended up in a loony bin upstate somewhere. I just got thrown into the world all at once with nothing. My dad had spent our fortune on gambling and whores. He was just about to file for bankruptcy before he passed so I was broke. I hadn’t been making friends, just enemies, so I didn’t have anyone to turn to. It really gave me a chance to utilize my talent.
I did all of the normal things to survive. I stole, I broke into homes, I squatted in abandoned buildings. I was pretty content, actually, just doing what I wanted. I became somewhat of a nomad, moving up from Santa Cruz to Oakland where I knew the real crime was happening. I had hoped I could somehow seep in with all of the other reprobates and no one would be the wiser, but I got picked up for loitering. Something really stupid and easy. Something I could’ve avoided. I had just started playing with homemade bombs around that time and was getting pretty skilled with a knife. I practiced on the cadavers on the Stanford campus for a couple months before I was outted by a guard who got tired of fucking me and decided he wanted to be a ‘good husband,’ whatever that meant. There were a million other things they could’ve gotten me for, but I let them pick me up for loitering. It was stupid.
At the police department, they processed me and threw me in with a bunch of hookers and drunks. I wasn’t scared really, just of being in a new place, but not scared of these people. It wasn’t long before I saw a face I recognized, smiling at me on the other side of the bars.
Tommy. In a cop’s uniform as if it were Halloween, but it was real. He was a cop. Oakland PD and he got me out of there so fast it would’ve made anyone’s head spin. He took me to his place and I spent the night. We talked all night between the times we made love, trying to fill in the gaps of time we’d missed with each other. He’d enrolled in college the summer he left and was some sort of criminal justice whiz. He took to it like a fish in water. He’d found his calling, he said. I was happy for him.
I told him my story. We hadn’t seen each other for I don't know how many years. I told him I’d been in love with him for a long time and had been sorry he left. He reciprocated, but we knew it was too late. That moment when we could’ve been together had already passed. We were obviously two different people on two different paths. I suppose I could’ve cleaned up my act, been the perfect little housewife for him and had a normal, everyday life where time passes similarly and individual days and weeks and months mold together into one long boring day. But I knew I had more to do. I wasn’t done and he understood. He kept my record clean. Ditched the loitering charge for me. Anything I needed, he said I could count on him and he kept his word.
But that was almost ten years ago. I wasn’t there – in that moment – anymore. Instead, I was in a disheveled hotel room where only the light from a flickering street lamp illuminated us on the catastrophe of a bed. Where I was remembering details I’d thought I’d forgotten, blocked out, and as I lean back, stretch out, never miss a beat, I remember those days vividly.
He occupies the open space I just created, vertical, but only for a moment before leaning over my curved torso and dragging his wet bottom lip up my sternum. Tongue on my nipple, biting, pinching, releasing. Never letting up the stroke of his fingers, the draw of his other hand on my hips, pulling me deeper into his lap in one of the best fucks I’ve had in so long I can’t remember. Maybe I take that back. Maybe I can remember after all.
* * * *
Something about my apartment at two in the afternoon is very specific. I don’t need a clock to tell me what time it is. Only the hazy glow over stunted orange paint, cracking infinitely in all directions. I focus in on it, much the same way anxiety makes you hone in on those little holes in the ceiling of a dentist’s office, just as he’s about to drill. You count each hole, hoping that by the time you’ve secured the numerical content of holes, he’ll be done.
I don’t remember how I got here. How I ended up on my couch, fully dressed, though precariously enough as if I had been drunk when doing it. I sit up and try to remember what happened. It feels as if it were all a fuzzy dream, hardly palpable, only traces floating through my head. Feeling my headache, I rub my forehead before gripping my neck and I remember. Heat pumping between my legs. Sweat beading on my skin. The taste of his tongue in my mouth and I remember all of it vividly as if repressed memories suddenly made known. They don’t feel like mine. It’s impossible.
I run to the bathroom just in time to throw up. Let the blood rush to my head for a good few seconds before I press repeat, play it over and over like a broken record. God. What have I done? Leaning over the sink as I catch my breath, I look into the cabinet mirror. No. It’s real. The bruises on my neck are very real. Cuts up and down my chest and arms are dry, red scrapes I begin to flush with warm water and a little bit of soap. His nails. I can feel them on me right now as I dress the wounds he inflicted. Sharp, scathing nails digging into my flesh like safety pins dragging their dull needles lifelessly. Making me feel. Leaving his mark so I won’t forget. So I would have this moment in the morning and remember him repeatedly. Every time I glide a tender finger over the raised, agitated skin, I’ll think of him and what I’ve done. A scab, a wound gouged, a piece of me taken from the fiber of my being and what I thought was someone with morals, with virtue, with steadfast determination to eradicate the filth in this town. Instead, I have become it, been reminded of it. Of me.
I throw up again.
Last edited by The Wench on 2008-05-13 03:10am, edited 1 time in total.
Geez baby. You sure do a creepy Joker. I like him though. Good job. It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it.
Blank Yellow (NSFW)
Hit it.
Blank Yellow (NSFW)
"Mostly Harmless Nutcase"
-
Mr. Coffee
- is an asshole.
- Posts: 3258
- Joined: 2005-02-26 07:45am
- Location: And banging your mom is half the battle... G.I. Joe!
Ok, Hav, you're my homie and all, but your woman is scary, perverted, and quite possible not all there upstairs. But I respect that in a lady.
That being said, keep writing it, Wench!
That being said, keep writing it, Wench!
I never would have thought I would wholeheartedly agree with Coffee... - fgalkin x2
Honestly, this board is so fucking stupid at times. - Thanas
GALE ForceCarwash: Oh, I'll wax that shit, bitch...
Thanks. I see those as compliments...Mr. Coffee wrote:Ok, Hav, you're my homie and all, but your woman is scary, perverted, and quite possible not all there upstairs. But I respect that in a lady.
Unfortunately for my sad ass, the next 70 pages of this monstrosity are all over the place...but I'm workin' on the next installment because I heart it with all my....heart...
Well, you know I don't dig the Joker smoking, but I really like how fucked up Nightingale is. Keep 'em coming baby!
For the record, this is the first time I have read any of TW's writing.
For the record, this is the first time I have read any of TW's writing.
It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it.
Blank Yellow (NSFW)
Hit it.
Blank Yellow (NSFW)
"Mostly Harmless Nutcase"
She writes, you draw... what a talented couple!
Keep them coming, Wench, I'm reading them despite myself.
Keep them coming, Wench, I'm reading them despite myself.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
-
The Yosemite Bear
- Mostly Harmless Nutcase (Requiescat in Pace)
- Posts: 35211
- Joined: 2002-07-21 02:38am
- Location: Dave's Not Here Man
that's ok I'm almost ready to start writting "Slight of Mind" Batfic, after 7 years....
of course "The Professor" is a mentally unstable person, who solves her idenity problems by creating a dominate personality.
of course "The Professor" is a mentally unstable person, who solves her idenity problems by creating a dominate personality.
The scariest folk song lyrics are "My Boy Grew up to be just like me" from cats in the cradle by Harry Chapin
Chapter 6
And it was a tough chapter, actually...frought with argument (mostly on my part) and a utilization of the 'delete' key the likes of which no one should ever have to know.
Chapter 6
“Fuck!!” I’d yelled it so many times tonight I couldn’t keep track. It wasn’t in me to keep count. Busily navigating the tight, one-way streets of San Francisco made it impossible to retain something as irrelevant as a numerical count of my cuss words. My car was hardly built to maneuver through such constricting, claustrophobic streets as these, but somehow I’d kept up this foxhunt. Not initially in a panic, but as the minutes dragged on, I began to feel the presentiment coming, a pinnacle to this lengthy jaunt that I knew would come to an end. It was just earlier than I’d expected. It’d only been a few months.
“What’re you doin, Elvie?! I mean, what the fuck do you think you’re doin?!” Tommy’s voice over the CB radio in my Nova was as clear as if he were my passenger. But he wasn’t beside me. He wasn’t even in the car. He was behind me in a haze of red and white barely visible through the cracked back window and the pouring rain.
I don’t answer. Keep driving as though my foot were made of a lead brick, as though the brake pedal were non-existent, as though my brakes were cut and I was plummeting downhill. Nothing can stop me. I’m a torpedo.
“Answer me!” He sounds as if he’s struggling to steer, to keep up with me and my erratic tactics to lose him. He always was a shitty driver.
“Fuck you, Tom.” I growl it through clenched chompers, though irate and maniacal, I hold back my want to be ferocious, to lash out over the airwaves. “You know what I’m doin.”
“Come on! Just stop! Let’s talk!” I hear the jerk of his car behind me the same instant it echoes over the radio on my dash.
“No! I’m done talking!” I suppose it was a little overdramatic to shoot the radio with the glock, but I wanted to make sure it was completely inoperative for the rest of my drive. I wanted him to get my point. That I really was done talking to him and inadvertently tore open my dash, shot through my own front windshield and nearly rammed into one of the many brick walls scattered throughout the ups and downs of the city. For the first ten minutes of his pursuit, my only goal was to avoid Lombard, but I’d added ‘avoid brick walls’ to that notably after almost careening into one. But it didn’t make much difference. The omphalos of my tirade was nearing its peak.
What the fuck is your plan, here? I had to ask myself the point to this. You’re going to fuckin’ jail for a long time and then this ride is over. I turn another tight corner, going the wrong way into traffic – if there was any at this most obscene time of the morning. No one’s up at four a.m. Except maybe the garbage man.
The warbled sound of the radio attempting to connect to something in the spiral of its death made me grin, just before tossing it out the broken passenger window and hearing it crumble against the cement before the crackle faded into obscurity. All that was left – the rumbling engine of the black and white behind me, keeping with my tread marks, gaining speed and closing the gap.
How did it come to this? I had to really consider the progression of events that culminated this boiling point where even Tommy was my enemy. My only ally and once partner in pre and post-pubescent crime was now my rival, and had the gall to pretend he suddenly didn’t know me, my predisposition, or my current lust for concocting homemade bombs and watching them blow even the healthiest, meatiest building up in a plume of smoke and debris. The most recent one being his apartment, and a few neighbors’ abodes, while in the process of trying to show him my latest batch of dynamite. But he hadn’t cared. Suddenly the spark in his eyes I’d known all my life had dwindled, shut off, and gone out the instant he had snatched it from me and made me sit. Made me subdue my excitement while he informed me – like a father to a child – that he was engaged to be married. That he was going to be moving away with her, and would I please not follow him.
“She would never understand…us.” His hands glide back and forth between our two bodies as he attempts to make me understand some connection he thinks we have. A connection we did have up until moments before he asked me to not be a part of his life. “I can’t see you anymore, Elvie.”
Maybe I was being a girl. I guess I overreacted a little, made it a little more life threatening than it really was. In hindsight, I was better off letting him go. He was a distraction to say the least. As of late, I’d been feeling as if I constantly needed to look over my shoulder, see if he was watching, even though I was always showing him my toys, sharing my half constructed ideas. I knew he wasn’t the same man I knew when I was 18, but part of me couldn’t forget. So when he’d transferred to SFPD, I naturally followed. I made a little home for myself in the city, quite close to his building in fact. There were numerous abandoned apartments and warehouses around to squat in, so finding a place to sleep wasn’t a problem. And the excessive homeless scattered around made it equally easy to hone my ‘craft’ without anyone being the wiser.
“But, Tom…you’re my best friend.” It was inconceivable to ask we forget our friendship, but it went on deaf ears. He didn’t even want to look at me, just asked me to go. So I did – but not before blowing the place sky high with him in it.
I hardly had the time to consider this being the quintessential moment in our lives together – our once coming together like an explosion, then a molding of sorts that created what could only be described as lethal, then this sudden implosion, explosion, whatever it was in our present barreling down the one-ways and alleyways and all the other ways that we could find. And now I was going to have to end it because it had to be me that would. He would never, in a million years, bring this to a head like I possibly could. Surely he’d throw me in prison and watch me rot from a peculiar distance, but he’d never do what needed to be done. What he had to, to stop me and make me go away all at once.
“Sorry, Tom…” Looking back, I’m not sure I gave it enough forethought or condolence. Maybe a little more pomp and circumstance was necessary for what I was about to reap, but I hadn’t the time or the patience to do either, or any. I just threw my right arm, heavily weighed down with the glock in my clasped fingers, behind the bench seat as if about to reverse, and started shooting. Over and over, right into his front windshield – at the driver’s side front windshield that I targeted in my rear view, my eyes bouncing back and forth between rear mirror and what lay ahead. Within moments, I’d hit my target as his black and white careened into a generic apartment building behind me and lit up in a blaze reminiscent of all those unbelievably cool car chase movies on late night TV, but as real as the cement I barreled over. I could hear a siren in the distance as I slowed at a red light. No reason to draw more attention now that the streets were deserted, my only complaint being Tommy on my ass. Now, a thing of the past. And as the red fire truck with screaming sirens passed me, I hoped for the best for him. I wished him luck in all of his pursuits, in all of his future car chases, and all of the cops and robbers drama he would be having in his head during his up-and-coming coma, if he came out that lucky.
I knew at that moment as I rolled down the window of the chocolate Nova and took in a deep breath of cool night air that it was time. Smelling the lingering scent of gravel up heaved by pounding rain, letting the tears finally roll down my heated cheeks, I knew immediately where I had to go, what I had to do. I knew the success of the upcoming process wasn’t accurate, but it was my only chance, I thought, to escape with sincere honesty backing me up once it was over. It was experimental to say the least, but who was I to argue? Beggars weren’t choosers, especially when it came to LexCorp, but I’d heard through the grapevine their dream team had concocted something potentially worthwhile, and that an old friend worked in the lab with test subjects. And, she was eager to help.
Chapter 6
“Fuck!!” I’d yelled it so many times tonight I couldn’t keep track. It wasn’t in me to keep count. Busily navigating the tight, one-way streets of San Francisco made it impossible to retain something as irrelevant as a numerical count of my cuss words. My car was hardly built to maneuver through such constricting, claustrophobic streets as these, but somehow I’d kept up this foxhunt. Not initially in a panic, but as the minutes dragged on, I began to feel the presentiment coming, a pinnacle to this lengthy jaunt that I knew would come to an end. It was just earlier than I’d expected. It’d only been a few months.
“What’re you doin, Elvie?! I mean, what the fuck do you think you’re doin?!” Tommy’s voice over the CB radio in my Nova was as clear as if he were my passenger. But he wasn’t beside me. He wasn’t even in the car. He was behind me in a haze of red and white barely visible through the cracked back window and the pouring rain.
I don’t answer. Keep driving as though my foot were made of a lead brick, as though the brake pedal were non-existent, as though my brakes were cut and I was plummeting downhill. Nothing can stop me. I’m a torpedo.
“Answer me!” He sounds as if he’s struggling to steer, to keep up with me and my erratic tactics to lose him. He always was a shitty driver.
“Fuck you, Tom.” I growl it through clenched chompers, though irate and maniacal, I hold back my want to be ferocious, to lash out over the airwaves. “You know what I’m doin.”
“Come on! Just stop! Let’s talk!” I hear the jerk of his car behind me the same instant it echoes over the radio on my dash.
“No! I’m done talking!” I suppose it was a little overdramatic to shoot the radio with the glock, but I wanted to make sure it was completely inoperative for the rest of my drive. I wanted him to get my point. That I really was done talking to him and inadvertently tore open my dash, shot through my own front windshield and nearly rammed into one of the many brick walls scattered throughout the ups and downs of the city. For the first ten minutes of his pursuit, my only goal was to avoid Lombard, but I’d added ‘avoid brick walls’ to that notably after almost careening into one. But it didn’t make much difference. The omphalos of my tirade was nearing its peak.
What the fuck is your plan, here? I had to ask myself the point to this. You’re going to fuckin’ jail for a long time and then this ride is over. I turn another tight corner, going the wrong way into traffic – if there was any at this most obscene time of the morning. No one’s up at four a.m. Except maybe the garbage man.
The warbled sound of the radio attempting to connect to something in the spiral of its death made me grin, just before tossing it out the broken passenger window and hearing it crumble against the cement before the crackle faded into obscurity. All that was left – the rumbling engine of the black and white behind me, keeping with my tread marks, gaining speed and closing the gap.
How did it come to this? I had to really consider the progression of events that culminated this boiling point where even Tommy was my enemy. My only ally and once partner in pre and post-pubescent crime was now my rival, and had the gall to pretend he suddenly didn’t know me, my predisposition, or my current lust for concocting homemade bombs and watching them blow even the healthiest, meatiest building up in a plume of smoke and debris. The most recent one being his apartment, and a few neighbors’ abodes, while in the process of trying to show him my latest batch of dynamite. But he hadn’t cared. Suddenly the spark in his eyes I’d known all my life had dwindled, shut off, and gone out the instant he had snatched it from me and made me sit. Made me subdue my excitement while he informed me – like a father to a child – that he was engaged to be married. That he was going to be moving away with her, and would I please not follow him.
“She would never understand…us.” His hands glide back and forth between our two bodies as he attempts to make me understand some connection he thinks we have. A connection we did have up until moments before he asked me to not be a part of his life. “I can’t see you anymore, Elvie.”
Maybe I was being a girl. I guess I overreacted a little, made it a little more life threatening than it really was. In hindsight, I was better off letting him go. He was a distraction to say the least. As of late, I’d been feeling as if I constantly needed to look over my shoulder, see if he was watching, even though I was always showing him my toys, sharing my half constructed ideas. I knew he wasn’t the same man I knew when I was 18, but part of me couldn’t forget. So when he’d transferred to SFPD, I naturally followed. I made a little home for myself in the city, quite close to his building in fact. There were numerous abandoned apartments and warehouses around to squat in, so finding a place to sleep wasn’t a problem. And the excessive homeless scattered around made it equally easy to hone my ‘craft’ without anyone being the wiser.
“But, Tom…you’re my best friend.” It was inconceivable to ask we forget our friendship, but it went on deaf ears. He didn’t even want to look at me, just asked me to go. So I did – but not before blowing the place sky high with him in it.
I hardly had the time to consider this being the quintessential moment in our lives together – our once coming together like an explosion, then a molding of sorts that created what could only be described as lethal, then this sudden implosion, explosion, whatever it was in our present barreling down the one-ways and alleyways and all the other ways that we could find. And now I was going to have to end it because it had to be me that would. He would never, in a million years, bring this to a head like I possibly could. Surely he’d throw me in prison and watch me rot from a peculiar distance, but he’d never do what needed to be done. What he had to, to stop me and make me go away all at once.
“Sorry, Tom…” Looking back, I’m not sure I gave it enough forethought or condolence. Maybe a little more pomp and circumstance was necessary for what I was about to reap, but I hadn’t the time or the patience to do either, or any. I just threw my right arm, heavily weighed down with the glock in my clasped fingers, behind the bench seat as if about to reverse, and started shooting. Over and over, right into his front windshield – at the driver’s side front windshield that I targeted in my rear view, my eyes bouncing back and forth between rear mirror and what lay ahead. Within moments, I’d hit my target as his black and white careened into a generic apartment building behind me and lit up in a blaze reminiscent of all those unbelievably cool car chase movies on late night TV, but as real as the cement I barreled over. I could hear a siren in the distance as I slowed at a red light. No reason to draw more attention now that the streets were deserted, my only complaint being Tommy on my ass. Now, a thing of the past. And as the red fire truck with screaming sirens passed me, I hoped for the best for him. I wished him luck in all of his pursuits, in all of his future car chases, and all of the cops and robbers drama he would be having in his head during his up-and-coming coma, if he came out that lucky.
I knew at that moment as I rolled down the window of the chocolate Nova and took in a deep breath of cool night air that it was time. Smelling the lingering scent of gravel up heaved by pounding rain, letting the tears finally roll down my heated cheeks, I knew immediately where I had to go, what I had to do. I knew the success of the upcoming process wasn’t accurate, but it was my only chance, I thought, to escape with sincere honesty backing me up once it was over. It was experimental to say the least, but who was I to argue? Beggars weren’t choosers, especially when it came to LexCorp, but I’d heard through the grapevine their dream team had concocted something potentially worthwhile, and that an old friend worked in the lab with test subjects. And, she was eager to help.
Chapter 7
Chapter 7
“You’re quiet.” Dick smiles with boyish inquisitiveness at me from across the circular table. Both hands sit patiently together on the white linen tablecloth before separating and lifting a breadstick from his left, my right, and chomping down.
“Just…thinking, I guess.” I’d been fidgeting with the silk dress I was wearing, tugging at the spaghetti straps, shifting in it uncomfortably as we sat. “I feel…”
“You look beautiful.” Dick. So innocent and seemingly sweet. I oftentimes want to get to know the guy under the mask, within the costume, the person who brings the blue and black to life. But even in a suit jacket and tie, crisp off-white shirt and slacks, hair maybe a little disheveled – probably done quickly in a fogged up mirror after a shower – he’s still not Dick Grayson. He’s more Bruce Wayne. And I don’t want to know Bruce all that intimately. Otherwise, I’d be having dinner with him.
Though I still acquiesced to his invite knowing this about him beforehand. As many times as he’d propositioned me, I’d turned him down. Maybe it was fear. That somewhere deep inside me, I longed to make someone, anyone, the receiver of my confessions, now having realized the only person able to find me out was the one person I had meant to deter entirely. Another snippet I longed to spill the beans about, but knew that were I to share, I doubt I’d be satisfied with the result. So I remained steadfast to my silence.
We spoke superficially. The boredom of the days, the weather being tumultuous, trivial longings that plagued us – we scratched the surface of every topic, attempting to find meaning. What were we doing here?
“Why purple?” Chin resting on his hand, elbow resting on the table, he gazed at me as if lingering over the question intently.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your dress. Why’d you pick purple? Ancient Romans thought it represented power, ya know?” Just like him to throw out some snippet of factual nothingness. Some bit of useless trivia.
“Um…” I opened my arms, let my eyes jump around my torso a few times in an attempt to come up with an adequate answer. “Actually, it was a gift.” And it was, though I hadn’t known from whom. It had appeared on my doorstep that afternoon. Sometime between my running errands, I guessed. Just a simple white box, sleeping peacefully enough, and I scooped it up and brought it inside like a good girl. Untied the silky green ribbon, simple and delicately adorning the gift, and pulled out the purple gown I now wore.
“From?”
I shrugged. “I dunno.” I’m still not lying. There was no card, no little scribbling indicating the giver, though my mind suddenly began to race. I had started to consider all of my acquaintances, any admirers, and when I first revealed the innards of the package, I hadn’t been able to come up with much. But now I had new information, something I had been so naïve about, and with it I began to consider what I at first thought a nonsensical Dick-ism – the significance of purple.
My stomach churned slightly. The potential vomit coagulating in my stomach, bubbling like a volcano that may erupt. No, it was impossible. That would be so…absurd. I disregarded the possibility immediately. It wasn’t him because the fact of the matter was – I didn’t want to believe it could be. Therefore, it wasn’t. God, please don’t let me be so blind.
“Geeze, it fits you perfectly. Like it was tailored or somethin’. It must be someone who knows you, at least. You really don’t know?!” He’s smiling, as if this might turn into a fun guessing game or something – practice for the junior detective. But he was right. It fit me perfectly, and though I’m not an oddity, my body has its particulars just like any other girl’s might. Maybe a little top heavy, maybe my hips are a little wide, maybe my waist is a little small. When I consider the nuances of purchasing clothes, I had to consider these aspects of my minutely disproportionate shape. It did fit me like a glove and had remarked to myself after slipping it on that it did do just that. And how peculiar, indeed. Why? Why didn’t I question these things?
“Must be…” And in all likelihood, it probably was tailored to me. Someone who knew me intimately, who knew the curves of my body, the length of my legs, important factors that made pulling this kind of dress off the rack – with hardly any give whatsoever – and expecting it to fit perfectly an impossibility. So, this person, this kind giver of gifts, was someone who knew my exterior, knew it with in depth knowledge, and perhaps with a sharp enough intellect and a determined recollection, they could memorize me in just a few hours. And it would’ve been all he had to go off of.
“What’s wrong, Em?” Even Dick’s warm palm on top of my hand makes me sicker, feel viler for even thinking I could sit across from him and pretend I belonged. Elvira, Elvira, Elvira. My name is Elvira. I want to tell him. I want it to fall out my mouth and have me – it – admit every sordid detail to him. Just to get it out, just to get something out because I suddenly feel like an impostor in a dress that’s just a sick reminder that I virtually prostituted to receive it in a Faustian act. And in my racing mind, I think Dick is more clever than he’s leading on, that he knows something and isn’t going to insinuate he’s figured out my dark secret, and I think I have it written on my face. The fact I’d showered over a dozen times since two days before meant nothing. His scent was etched into my DNA and it emitted clues through my pores.
Suddenly I was burning up. I had to get air. I had to take off the dress.
“Where’re you…?” Dick stands to meet my rising, but I put out a weak sort of hand, advising he sit back down.
“I’ll be back. I just…I just need some air.” I smile, hoping he doesn’t take it personally, although it may very well be. I’m not sure if it’s him or if it’s me – or the third party that just isn’t at the table, swimming through my mind in a pool of shimmering gore as cool and as capable as an Olympic hopeful.
I walk as fast as my stilettos will take me to the bathroom, but change my mind at the last moment. Avoid the bathroom. Instead, I take the front door, seizing the quickest route around the nearest corner where I can lean against frozen bricks, pierce my exposed shoulder blades, and take a few deep breaths in the attempt to calm my jitters. Though, even after a few minutes of this act, I only end up with a quivering hand and lightheadedness.
“Well, well.” The voice to my immediate left, from the shadowy depths of the alley, spurns familiar recognition in me, even with shut eyes. “How funny…that we might meet here…”
I don’t need to open my eyes to know it’s him. I can smell him all around me before feeling his finger across my breastplate, trickling slowly, methodically from shoulder to shoulder, end to end, before falling between my cleavage where his casual brushing of fanned fingers against my breasts produces my exhale like a reflex. Somehow I think if I keep my eyes closed, I won’t have to acknowledge him.
“It’s sweet how you pretend repulsion…but you and I both know…that just isn’t you.” His pursed lips pucker against the center of my chest, a feat he may very well have had to struggle in. Perhaps having to curl over himself, bend and contort uncomfortably in order to reach my height so far below him. But regardless of the struggle he endured, I could feel his mouth grazing patiently around my throat, seeking out the perfect spot where I imagined he’d rip me apart with his jaws. “I had no idea the purple would look so…delicious on you.”
“So it was you.” I’m staring into his pupils, dark and deep, vast as the midnight sky without the stars glistening back at me and the moon lighting the way. Just an endless chasm, a stygian darkness.
He doesn’t answer, but straightens so he towers above me, forces me to stare up at him by lifting my chin as high as it will stretch, reflecting his snow white face staring downward with his elongated chin pointing into his chest, at his violet tie that suddenly gets my attention.
“And you go and waste it on the boy who thinks he can fly like his pathetic, self-righteous father-figure.” His tie. It matches my dress perfectly. It even feels the same under my touch. “I suppose I can see the attraction…a young, morally steadfast know-it-all. How very…” I sink in his eyes again, but now I have a chance to study the sparkling green circling his pupil, hypnotizing me. “…boring.”
“I’m having a wonderful time, actually.” I glimpse my fingers, knuckles reddening in the frozen air, against the black of his suit, beside the shiny, perfect buttons that hold his jacket shut. The ones I finger childishly, unhooking with ease. “He’s a perfect gentleman.”
“Is that so?” His sides are warmer than any furnace and I can feel the ache release from my icy hands as I hide them under his jacket, against his ribcage, under his arms where the heat of his body is the most permeating. “Yawn.”
I have yet to realize I’m hugging him in the alleyway, holding him so tight I can hear his heartbeat pounding against my cheek, determined to force blood through every single vein within the multitude. Strange to be holding him as though he were more my protector than my foe, as if I’d never felt more comfortable, as if I’d known this person my whole life.
“I’ll probably go home with him.”
“I don’t doubt it for a second…” Each of his gloved paws curl under the cheeks of my ass, closing forcefully. “But will you really be fucking him…or me…Emma?” The way he says it makes the false name feel even more like a fragile skeleton of a person.
“You know my real name…” My eyes peruse him as if flipping through a book you heard about vaguely, so you search precariously, looking for something that catches your eye before making the decision – then and there – to purchase. It’s the tie that does it for me tonight. “You should call me by it if you’re gonna’ do that sorta thing from now on…”
“I am, darling…dear heart…” A kiss on my forehead, softly planted. “Are you?”
The mist in the alley swallows him up in a sudden whirlwind and I’m alone to contemplate the perfectly squared sections of cement under my feet, how each gunmetal block, alone, is nothing but a simple square to be mathematically calculated for size, ratio, and circumference. I ignore his comment, ponder the alternate and invisible planes encompassing all sides, a victim of Euclidean geometry. But together, with the hoard of multiple blocks just like it, it becomes something bigger, something important and though no one looks on the single block as a definitive marker, a testament to cement blocks everywhere, no one could deny its impact if it vanished. And together, they are nothing but a simple path, yet how very important in its single absence. How very important, then, is the one…boring…block.
But I have to put it all together. I need to make sense of the puzzle, the little pieces making the bigger picture. The brick and mortar of me. How many times was he going to appear out of nowhere and flip my life upside down? How many times could he conceivably do it before I wasn’t in utter shock at his knowing something else about me – something I honestly hadn’t known myself. Or, thought I hadn’t.
“Dick?” He’s attentive to my girly voice across from him after I’ve sat down once more, appearing as though I’ve collected my thoughts, I’m ready for whatever will come my way. I’m as cool as a cucumber. “Do you know the name…Elvira Mathers?”
His face says he’s confused, suddenly freezing in mid-bite of another breadstick. From what I can tell of the almost empty bread basket, he’s been chomping on them since I left.
“Um…yea.” His face then goes soft, as though hardened wax melting under intense heat, making it pliable and mushy. Comical, even. “Are you…I mean, you want to talk about it?”
“What?” The rolling in my stomach makes me feel that same guttural tumbling act all over again. I may very well projectile vomit all over the table if he outs me right here – especially with the over exaggerated look of exhilaration he has strewn all over his face. “Why would I…?” Yes, play dumb.
“Well, I guess…I mean, we thought…it was probably a sore subject with you since you never talked about it or mentioned it at all. I mean, we…I…totally understand. Who would want to talk about…that.”
“Um…” I try to look as innocent as I can without appearing I don’t know what he’s talking about. Obviously, it’s not as bad as I think it is. “Riiiight…”
“I mean…” His whisper is hardly necessary since the place is empty, but he covers his mouth with an open palm anyhow, as if we’re surrounded. “Your sister was just…she was crazy. We all know that, but we know it obviously hasn’t reflected onto you whatsoever.”
“My sister?” My sister is dead. Been dead. Since I was a little kid, though if he were to ask me, I couldn’t say what she died from, or of. Like I said, I’d often forgotten about her entirely, including what her name had been.
“Yea, Elvira. Your sister. The one who…” He doesn’t want to say it, whatever it is, but I swing my hands out, roll them suggesting he just get on with it because I’m getting tired of guessing what it is in my life that is so terrible I have to fear mention of my dead sister’s antics. And from where? Beyond the grave? “Burned the entire medical ward at Stanford before she…” He cringes. “Played with the corpses.”
Wait. What? That wasn’t my sister. That was… “Yea, drove my mom so crazy she killed my dad.” I sound like a zombie spouting out the sentence. “Got her put in the nuthouse.”
“Did you see her at Arkham…when you took Riddler?”
I shake my head, but even that feels mechanical. It’s like I’m not even here anymore. “No. I visited someone else. A friend of hers.”
He chuckles. “Some friend.”
Yea. Some friend.
“You’re quiet.” Dick smiles with boyish inquisitiveness at me from across the circular table. Both hands sit patiently together on the white linen tablecloth before separating and lifting a breadstick from his left, my right, and chomping down.
“Just…thinking, I guess.” I’d been fidgeting with the silk dress I was wearing, tugging at the spaghetti straps, shifting in it uncomfortably as we sat. “I feel…”
“You look beautiful.” Dick. So innocent and seemingly sweet. I oftentimes want to get to know the guy under the mask, within the costume, the person who brings the blue and black to life. But even in a suit jacket and tie, crisp off-white shirt and slacks, hair maybe a little disheveled – probably done quickly in a fogged up mirror after a shower – he’s still not Dick Grayson. He’s more Bruce Wayne. And I don’t want to know Bruce all that intimately. Otherwise, I’d be having dinner with him.
Though I still acquiesced to his invite knowing this about him beforehand. As many times as he’d propositioned me, I’d turned him down. Maybe it was fear. That somewhere deep inside me, I longed to make someone, anyone, the receiver of my confessions, now having realized the only person able to find me out was the one person I had meant to deter entirely. Another snippet I longed to spill the beans about, but knew that were I to share, I doubt I’d be satisfied with the result. So I remained steadfast to my silence.
We spoke superficially. The boredom of the days, the weather being tumultuous, trivial longings that plagued us – we scratched the surface of every topic, attempting to find meaning. What were we doing here?
“Why purple?” Chin resting on his hand, elbow resting on the table, he gazed at me as if lingering over the question intently.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your dress. Why’d you pick purple? Ancient Romans thought it represented power, ya know?” Just like him to throw out some snippet of factual nothingness. Some bit of useless trivia.
“Um…” I opened my arms, let my eyes jump around my torso a few times in an attempt to come up with an adequate answer. “Actually, it was a gift.” And it was, though I hadn’t known from whom. It had appeared on my doorstep that afternoon. Sometime between my running errands, I guessed. Just a simple white box, sleeping peacefully enough, and I scooped it up and brought it inside like a good girl. Untied the silky green ribbon, simple and delicately adorning the gift, and pulled out the purple gown I now wore.
“From?”
I shrugged. “I dunno.” I’m still not lying. There was no card, no little scribbling indicating the giver, though my mind suddenly began to race. I had started to consider all of my acquaintances, any admirers, and when I first revealed the innards of the package, I hadn’t been able to come up with much. But now I had new information, something I had been so naïve about, and with it I began to consider what I at first thought a nonsensical Dick-ism – the significance of purple.
My stomach churned slightly. The potential vomit coagulating in my stomach, bubbling like a volcano that may erupt. No, it was impossible. That would be so…absurd. I disregarded the possibility immediately. It wasn’t him because the fact of the matter was – I didn’t want to believe it could be. Therefore, it wasn’t. God, please don’t let me be so blind.
“Geeze, it fits you perfectly. Like it was tailored or somethin’. It must be someone who knows you, at least. You really don’t know?!” He’s smiling, as if this might turn into a fun guessing game or something – practice for the junior detective. But he was right. It fit me perfectly, and though I’m not an oddity, my body has its particulars just like any other girl’s might. Maybe a little top heavy, maybe my hips are a little wide, maybe my waist is a little small. When I consider the nuances of purchasing clothes, I had to consider these aspects of my minutely disproportionate shape. It did fit me like a glove and had remarked to myself after slipping it on that it did do just that. And how peculiar, indeed. Why? Why didn’t I question these things?
“Must be…” And in all likelihood, it probably was tailored to me. Someone who knew me intimately, who knew the curves of my body, the length of my legs, important factors that made pulling this kind of dress off the rack – with hardly any give whatsoever – and expecting it to fit perfectly an impossibility. So, this person, this kind giver of gifts, was someone who knew my exterior, knew it with in depth knowledge, and perhaps with a sharp enough intellect and a determined recollection, they could memorize me in just a few hours. And it would’ve been all he had to go off of.
“What’s wrong, Em?” Even Dick’s warm palm on top of my hand makes me sicker, feel viler for even thinking I could sit across from him and pretend I belonged. Elvira, Elvira, Elvira. My name is Elvira. I want to tell him. I want it to fall out my mouth and have me – it – admit every sordid detail to him. Just to get it out, just to get something out because I suddenly feel like an impostor in a dress that’s just a sick reminder that I virtually prostituted to receive it in a Faustian act. And in my racing mind, I think Dick is more clever than he’s leading on, that he knows something and isn’t going to insinuate he’s figured out my dark secret, and I think I have it written on my face. The fact I’d showered over a dozen times since two days before meant nothing. His scent was etched into my DNA and it emitted clues through my pores.
Suddenly I was burning up. I had to get air. I had to take off the dress.
“Where’re you…?” Dick stands to meet my rising, but I put out a weak sort of hand, advising he sit back down.
“I’ll be back. I just…I just need some air.” I smile, hoping he doesn’t take it personally, although it may very well be. I’m not sure if it’s him or if it’s me – or the third party that just isn’t at the table, swimming through my mind in a pool of shimmering gore as cool and as capable as an Olympic hopeful.
I walk as fast as my stilettos will take me to the bathroom, but change my mind at the last moment. Avoid the bathroom. Instead, I take the front door, seizing the quickest route around the nearest corner where I can lean against frozen bricks, pierce my exposed shoulder blades, and take a few deep breaths in the attempt to calm my jitters. Though, even after a few minutes of this act, I only end up with a quivering hand and lightheadedness.
“Well, well.” The voice to my immediate left, from the shadowy depths of the alley, spurns familiar recognition in me, even with shut eyes. “How funny…that we might meet here…”
I don’t need to open my eyes to know it’s him. I can smell him all around me before feeling his finger across my breastplate, trickling slowly, methodically from shoulder to shoulder, end to end, before falling between my cleavage where his casual brushing of fanned fingers against my breasts produces my exhale like a reflex. Somehow I think if I keep my eyes closed, I won’t have to acknowledge him.
“It’s sweet how you pretend repulsion…but you and I both know…that just isn’t you.” His pursed lips pucker against the center of my chest, a feat he may very well have had to struggle in. Perhaps having to curl over himself, bend and contort uncomfortably in order to reach my height so far below him. But regardless of the struggle he endured, I could feel his mouth grazing patiently around my throat, seeking out the perfect spot where I imagined he’d rip me apart with his jaws. “I had no idea the purple would look so…delicious on you.”
“So it was you.” I’m staring into his pupils, dark and deep, vast as the midnight sky without the stars glistening back at me and the moon lighting the way. Just an endless chasm, a stygian darkness.
He doesn’t answer, but straightens so he towers above me, forces me to stare up at him by lifting my chin as high as it will stretch, reflecting his snow white face staring downward with his elongated chin pointing into his chest, at his violet tie that suddenly gets my attention.
“And you go and waste it on the boy who thinks he can fly like his pathetic, self-righteous father-figure.” His tie. It matches my dress perfectly. It even feels the same under my touch. “I suppose I can see the attraction…a young, morally steadfast know-it-all. How very…” I sink in his eyes again, but now I have a chance to study the sparkling green circling his pupil, hypnotizing me. “…boring.”
“I’m having a wonderful time, actually.” I glimpse my fingers, knuckles reddening in the frozen air, against the black of his suit, beside the shiny, perfect buttons that hold his jacket shut. The ones I finger childishly, unhooking with ease. “He’s a perfect gentleman.”
“Is that so?” His sides are warmer than any furnace and I can feel the ache release from my icy hands as I hide them under his jacket, against his ribcage, under his arms where the heat of his body is the most permeating. “Yawn.”
I have yet to realize I’m hugging him in the alleyway, holding him so tight I can hear his heartbeat pounding against my cheek, determined to force blood through every single vein within the multitude. Strange to be holding him as though he were more my protector than my foe, as if I’d never felt more comfortable, as if I’d known this person my whole life.
“I’ll probably go home with him.”
“I don’t doubt it for a second…” Each of his gloved paws curl under the cheeks of my ass, closing forcefully. “But will you really be fucking him…or me…Emma?” The way he says it makes the false name feel even more like a fragile skeleton of a person.
“You know my real name…” My eyes peruse him as if flipping through a book you heard about vaguely, so you search precariously, looking for something that catches your eye before making the decision – then and there – to purchase. It’s the tie that does it for me tonight. “You should call me by it if you’re gonna’ do that sorta thing from now on…”
“I am, darling…dear heart…” A kiss on my forehead, softly planted. “Are you?”
The mist in the alley swallows him up in a sudden whirlwind and I’m alone to contemplate the perfectly squared sections of cement under my feet, how each gunmetal block, alone, is nothing but a simple square to be mathematically calculated for size, ratio, and circumference. I ignore his comment, ponder the alternate and invisible planes encompassing all sides, a victim of Euclidean geometry. But together, with the hoard of multiple blocks just like it, it becomes something bigger, something important and though no one looks on the single block as a definitive marker, a testament to cement blocks everywhere, no one could deny its impact if it vanished. And together, they are nothing but a simple path, yet how very important in its single absence. How very important, then, is the one…boring…block.
But I have to put it all together. I need to make sense of the puzzle, the little pieces making the bigger picture. The brick and mortar of me. How many times was he going to appear out of nowhere and flip my life upside down? How many times could he conceivably do it before I wasn’t in utter shock at his knowing something else about me – something I honestly hadn’t known myself. Or, thought I hadn’t.
“Dick?” He’s attentive to my girly voice across from him after I’ve sat down once more, appearing as though I’ve collected my thoughts, I’m ready for whatever will come my way. I’m as cool as a cucumber. “Do you know the name…Elvira Mathers?”
His face says he’s confused, suddenly freezing in mid-bite of another breadstick. From what I can tell of the almost empty bread basket, he’s been chomping on them since I left.
“Um…yea.” His face then goes soft, as though hardened wax melting under intense heat, making it pliable and mushy. Comical, even. “Are you…I mean, you want to talk about it?”
“What?” The rolling in my stomach makes me feel that same guttural tumbling act all over again. I may very well projectile vomit all over the table if he outs me right here – especially with the over exaggerated look of exhilaration he has strewn all over his face. “Why would I…?” Yes, play dumb.
“Well, I guess…I mean, we thought…it was probably a sore subject with you since you never talked about it or mentioned it at all. I mean, we…I…totally understand. Who would want to talk about…that.”
“Um…” I try to look as innocent as I can without appearing I don’t know what he’s talking about. Obviously, it’s not as bad as I think it is. “Riiiight…”
“I mean…” His whisper is hardly necessary since the place is empty, but he covers his mouth with an open palm anyhow, as if we’re surrounded. “Your sister was just…she was crazy. We all know that, but we know it obviously hasn’t reflected onto you whatsoever.”
“My sister?” My sister is dead. Been dead. Since I was a little kid, though if he were to ask me, I couldn’t say what she died from, or of. Like I said, I’d often forgotten about her entirely, including what her name had been.
“Yea, Elvira. Your sister. The one who…” He doesn’t want to say it, whatever it is, but I swing my hands out, roll them suggesting he just get on with it because I’m getting tired of guessing what it is in my life that is so terrible I have to fear mention of my dead sister’s antics. And from where? Beyond the grave? “Burned the entire medical ward at Stanford before she…” He cringes. “Played with the corpses.”
Wait. What? That wasn’t my sister. That was… “Yea, drove my mom so crazy she killed my dad.” I sound like a zombie spouting out the sentence. “Got her put in the nuthouse.”
“Did you see her at Arkham…when you took Riddler?”
I shake my head, but even that feels mechanical. It’s like I’m not even here anymore. “No. I visited someone else. A friend of hers.”
He chuckles. “Some friend.”
Yea. Some friend.
Chapter 8
Been a bit of time juggling REAL essays, but finally felt the itch... These next few are a little short...
Chapter 8
I woke in a sweat, pouring down like a steady stream of water down my forehead, under my arms, between my legs, and though I felt damper than a wet rag, the sheets were still dry, pillow far from moist, and Dick was hardly bothered by my now imaginary midnight secretions.
I’d feigned horror, upset, a total inconsolable mess at the dinner table we shared. I thought it would buy me some time to think, maybe appear as if my confusion was more like grief once attempting to resolve my feelings vis-à-vis a sister that had apparently been running around mimicking every sick little thing I’d been recalling in my mind for the last few days. It was fucking with me still as I sat up in bed, a breeze barreling through the open curtains, and yet I felt as though I was an inferno. What the hell was this?
Maybe they were just memories I was having about her. Maybe everything I knew about my childhood was a farce and she hadn’t died like I thought. Was I that screwed up I’d really put that out of my mind? No, that didn’t make sense right away. Joker already pegged me as the tyrant responsible for these atrocities I saw vividly when I shut my eyes. But Elvira Mathers committed them, and when he named me, it all flushed back like a horrid dream I’d forgotten, pushed aside, crushed under other happy times that took their place. I was Elvira…but now I wasn’t so sure anymore. I was confused.
The facts were there. I’d done these things. I’d done terrible, awful, unfathomable things that no amount of apology could excuse or atonement could erase. Evidently, Elvira Mathers had done these things. That was sure. I had thought that was me, that I had acquired Emma Mathews as a pseudonym, a cover up. A good one cause it had worked up until this point because even I was confused about my real identity. No wonder the Bat never found me. But if he was looking for my sister, of course he wouldn’t find me. So, how did I do it?
I tried not to disturb Dick as I got up from the bed, turned quietly around to watch him sleeping peacefully, fully dressed and complacent as ever. He appeared a baby in total harmony with slumber, funny that I figured they all slept like I did, in a tornado of awake and dreaming, constant exasperation and frustration, writhing in insomnia and nightmares. Nightmares where I did despicable things to so many innocent people. Nightmares that had turned out to be memories trying to break through, come to the surface so I might finally identify them as truths. Only after Joker snapped something awake inside me did I finally start to realize the disconnect. Awake was asleep, and asleep was awake.
But as I dressed in the dark, pulled a sweater over the exterior stickiness, I tried to fill in the blanks. I’d been fingerprinted like everyone else by B. Dick had told me it was standard procedure. I wasn’t like him or Tim. Bruce hadn’t rescued me as a child and nursed me back to crime fighting health. I was an outsider, an external hire, and that meant he addressed every avenue of my life. So it didn’t make sense. Who was the fucking detective here? Since when did Joker have the advantage?
Suddenly it was driving me crazy – the cogs churning in my head, trying to make sense of nonsense, of what I thought I was and now wasn’t, then realized I also wasn’t, and now I was wrapped up in some conundrum conducive to madness, likened to the game of Clue, which I loved up until the moment it was just an innocent way to pass the time and now the definition of my reality. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I couldn’t say it enough in my head as I scrambled out of the apartment both quietly and quickly, shutting the door with a soft click and a jingle of my keys securing Dick inside and didn’t even consider what it might look like if he were to wake and find me gone. I didn’t care. It was the least of my worries right now. I needed answers and I knew where to go to start the rollercoaster downward.
I didn’t even bother with the elevator. I ran the entire stairwell and didn’t care if I woke up the neighbors, crack sellers, pimps, and hookers that occupied the other abodes. Just get to the car, I told myself, and then you can start figuring this out, before Joker does it for you. Just before shooting you, fucking you, strangling you, so he can get off on your death/surprise/asphyxiation.
I was paranoid as hell, like I’d just smoked an entire bowl with Cheech and Chong and thought every dormant car on every corner was a cop incognito. I drove carefully so I didn’t look conspicuous, but probably looked more erratic than ever. Regardless, I drove the distance to Wayne Manor silently and in so much inner turmoil I couldn’t have possibly spotted a real cop anyhow, and parked the moment I was close enough to the front door, and took the garage entrance so I didn’t disturb Alfred who was always on alert. A hyperactive Poodle, every sound was like a dog whistle to him, and was sure my presence in the middle of the night – uninvited – might look a little strange. Though he’d probably only ask if I needed a cup of tea and a chat, I didn’t have the tolerance for that either. I just needed to get into the cave and hope Bruce wasn’t there, furrowing his brow as he penetrated the computer screen with his brooding gaze.
“You’re up late.” Damn. He was already full speed ahead with his menacing stare, though still in cape and cowl, my guess was he was either on his way out, or on his way in.
“Yea…” I stepped lightly down the brick entryway leading to the cave’s initial platform, the open tennis court-sized base that housed two master computers, virtually any gadget I could imagine, and a coffee table with two cold sandwiches resting on a tray, untouched. Typical. “I um…was getting stir-crazy, I guess.” Guilt would normally have clouded my want to lie to him, but it was suddenly not so grievous a contrivance.
He hardly made a peep, just a half-assed groan or a grumble. His way of acknowledging my voice, at least, before going back to whatever he was immersed in before I interrupted.
“Going out or…coming back?” I tried not to sound like it mattered, but it really was going to hinder my searching if his looking over my shoulder was a constant threat. Not sure I wanted to explain why I was searching the database on my supposed dead sister whom everyone was afraid to bring up for fear of exciting my womanly sensibilities.
“Out.” Tapping on the keys, head bouncing up and down, up and down, from keyboard to screen before standing abruptly. “Why?”
I shrugged. “No reason.” He passes me with shifty eyes. Always suspicious, Bruce. Always. “Mind if I…?” I point to the second empty computer chair, closest to me.
“You break it, you bought it.” The end. A grumble of the car’s ignition, pistons firing, acceleration engaging and he was gone. Just like that.
“Thank fuckin’ God.” I couldn’t type fast enough to reach the password-encrypted files for literally every criminal in the country – an endless databank that spanned FBI info from Herbert Hoover’s own fingertips all the way to Arkham’s personal profiles. Any little thing was fair game, and I chanced there might either be a limitless amount of collateral, or nothing at all. It was only midnight, and so I got started.
Chapter 8
I woke in a sweat, pouring down like a steady stream of water down my forehead, under my arms, between my legs, and though I felt damper than a wet rag, the sheets were still dry, pillow far from moist, and Dick was hardly bothered by my now imaginary midnight secretions.
I’d feigned horror, upset, a total inconsolable mess at the dinner table we shared. I thought it would buy me some time to think, maybe appear as if my confusion was more like grief once attempting to resolve my feelings vis-à-vis a sister that had apparently been running around mimicking every sick little thing I’d been recalling in my mind for the last few days. It was fucking with me still as I sat up in bed, a breeze barreling through the open curtains, and yet I felt as though I was an inferno. What the hell was this?
Maybe they were just memories I was having about her. Maybe everything I knew about my childhood was a farce and she hadn’t died like I thought. Was I that screwed up I’d really put that out of my mind? No, that didn’t make sense right away. Joker already pegged me as the tyrant responsible for these atrocities I saw vividly when I shut my eyes. But Elvira Mathers committed them, and when he named me, it all flushed back like a horrid dream I’d forgotten, pushed aside, crushed under other happy times that took their place. I was Elvira…but now I wasn’t so sure anymore. I was confused.
The facts were there. I’d done these things. I’d done terrible, awful, unfathomable things that no amount of apology could excuse or atonement could erase. Evidently, Elvira Mathers had done these things. That was sure. I had thought that was me, that I had acquired Emma Mathews as a pseudonym, a cover up. A good one cause it had worked up until this point because even I was confused about my real identity. No wonder the Bat never found me. But if he was looking for my sister, of course he wouldn’t find me. So, how did I do it?
I tried not to disturb Dick as I got up from the bed, turned quietly around to watch him sleeping peacefully, fully dressed and complacent as ever. He appeared a baby in total harmony with slumber, funny that I figured they all slept like I did, in a tornado of awake and dreaming, constant exasperation and frustration, writhing in insomnia and nightmares. Nightmares where I did despicable things to so many innocent people. Nightmares that had turned out to be memories trying to break through, come to the surface so I might finally identify them as truths. Only after Joker snapped something awake inside me did I finally start to realize the disconnect. Awake was asleep, and asleep was awake.
But as I dressed in the dark, pulled a sweater over the exterior stickiness, I tried to fill in the blanks. I’d been fingerprinted like everyone else by B. Dick had told me it was standard procedure. I wasn’t like him or Tim. Bruce hadn’t rescued me as a child and nursed me back to crime fighting health. I was an outsider, an external hire, and that meant he addressed every avenue of my life. So it didn’t make sense. Who was the fucking detective here? Since when did Joker have the advantage?
Suddenly it was driving me crazy – the cogs churning in my head, trying to make sense of nonsense, of what I thought I was and now wasn’t, then realized I also wasn’t, and now I was wrapped up in some conundrum conducive to madness, likened to the game of Clue, which I loved up until the moment it was just an innocent way to pass the time and now the definition of my reality. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I couldn’t say it enough in my head as I scrambled out of the apartment both quietly and quickly, shutting the door with a soft click and a jingle of my keys securing Dick inside and didn’t even consider what it might look like if he were to wake and find me gone. I didn’t care. It was the least of my worries right now. I needed answers and I knew where to go to start the rollercoaster downward.
I didn’t even bother with the elevator. I ran the entire stairwell and didn’t care if I woke up the neighbors, crack sellers, pimps, and hookers that occupied the other abodes. Just get to the car, I told myself, and then you can start figuring this out, before Joker does it for you. Just before shooting you, fucking you, strangling you, so he can get off on your death/surprise/asphyxiation.
I was paranoid as hell, like I’d just smoked an entire bowl with Cheech and Chong and thought every dormant car on every corner was a cop incognito. I drove carefully so I didn’t look conspicuous, but probably looked more erratic than ever. Regardless, I drove the distance to Wayne Manor silently and in so much inner turmoil I couldn’t have possibly spotted a real cop anyhow, and parked the moment I was close enough to the front door, and took the garage entrance so I didn’t disturb Alfred who was always on alert. A hyperactive Poodle, every sound was like a dog whistle to him, and was sure my presence in the middle of the night – uninvited – might look a little strange. Though he’d probably only ask if I needed a cup of tea and a chat, I didn’t have the tolerance for that either. I just needed to get into the cave and hope Bruce wasn’t there, furrowing his brow as he penetrated the computer screen with his brooding gaze.
“You’re up late.” Damn. He was already full speed ahead with his menacing stare, though still in cape and cowl, my guess was he was either on his way out, or on his way in.
“Yea…” I stepped lightly down the brick entryway leading to the cave’s initial platform, the open tennis court-sized base that housed two master computers, virtually any gadget I could imagine, and a coffee table with two cold sandwiches resting on a tray, untouched. Typical. “I um…was getting stir-crazy, I guess.” Guilt would normally have clouded my want to lie to him, but it was suddenly not so grievous a contrivance.
He hardly made a peep, just a half-assed groan or a grumble. His way of acknowledging my voice, at least, before going back to whatever he was immersed in before I interrupted.
“Going out or…coming back?” I tried not to sound like it mattered, but it really was going to hinder my searching if his looking over my shoulder was a constant threat. Not sure I wanted to explain why I was searching the database on my supposed dead sister whom everyone was afraid to bring up for fear of exciting my womanly sensibilities.
“Out.” Tapping on the keys, head bouncing up and down, up and down, from keyboard to screen before standing abruptly. “Why?”
I shrugged. “No reason.” He passes me with shifty eyes. Always suspicious, Bruce. Always. “Mind if I…?” I point to the second empty computer chair, closest to me.
“You break it, you bought it.” The end. A grumble of the car’s ignition, pistons firing, acceleration engaging and he was gone. Just like that.
“Thank fuckin’ God.” I couldn’t type fast enough to reach the password-encrypted files for literally every criminal in the country – an endless databank that spanned FBI info from Herbert Hoover’s own fingertips all the way to Arkham’s personal profiles. Any little thing was fair game, and I chanced there might either be a limitless amount of collateral, or nothing at all. It was only midnight, and so I got started.
Chapter 9
Chapter 9
It’d been weeks since I’d felt the rush of a breeze against the fragile pale skin on my face. It stung like shit – like icicles jabbing me repeatedly and salt following in each abrasion – but it felt like an awakening, a cleansing in the purifying waters of Jesus and I was saved. And the imagery made me laugh so hard it brought frozen tears to the corners of my eyes because it coincided with my pulling out mini tear gas explosives, shaped like little metallic bats, and imbedding them into the wall in front of the perp I was in pursuit of with one overhead throw. In their gaseous release, he barreled through a cloud so thick it was like fog, and the screaming came instantly when he couldn’t see and the pain was so immense he had to stop running. My laughter ensued once his screams turned into pig-like squeals. So I hog tied him, stuck an apple in his mouth, and hung him from the fourth floor window of the condemned apartment complex he’d attempted to lose me in during our chase.
“They’re gonna love you in the clink.” Smacking his cheek just before pinning a crayola-like note to his chest reading “I have the Mercedes Diamond,” and lowering him with ease over the side of the building. Before leaving, I secured the rope to the sturdiest material I could find – a stair railing. A big, thick hunk of wood, gray-white like uncooked bacon fat, jutted up from the floor. I began the knot easily enough, though halfway through I started to argue with myself regarding the state of this knot. I mechanically started a timber-hitch, knowing I needed to keep this guy held for a while, unsure when the cops would show to claim him, but suddenly started undoing it halfway through, arguing it didn’t need to be such a certain knot. I could precariously do an overhand, pretzel-like knot and call it a night. So what if it came undone during the course of the night? This guy broke the law. He should pay. And if the rope broke and he fell three stories to the broken crags of gnarled sidewalk below him, all the better. He’ll learn to never mess with me again.
So I justified my reasoning for not tying a knot at all. I swung the working end round the meat of the stake, hooked it a few times within itself, and took the roof towards downtown, feeling happier than I had in a long time at having finally felt the sweet success of justice without its sugar coated complexity overpowering it. Sure, he’d probably just hang there without so much as a slip of the rope, but the chance of it slipping had been drastically increased, and as I dove between alleyways and the gaps between skyscrapers, futuristic earthquake safe towers, and gothic cathedrals withstanding the test of time, I mentally patted myself on the back and couldn’t wait for the next cretin to cross my path. I was gonna’ make an example out of all of them.
For five nights in a row I put the unjust in their place. Fathomed unthinkable obscenities flung from the mouths of careless, infantile henchmen, minced words with a bird-loving gambler many would call a traitor to his kind, and roughed up a ditzy blonde – attempting to exact rule while trying not to make it appear personal, or obvious, or connected on any level by a third party we intimately knew. But taking it a little too far seemed suddenly necessary, and it being excessive didn’t stave off the satisfaction of watching her get hauled off in the back seat of a squad car. It felt good. Warranted. I was finally winning.
“What’s the story with Harley?” B is hovering over me – cemented, pensive, arms crossed as though my middle school principal wanting to know why I super glued Tommy’s hands to the wood bench in the girl’s locker room…for the fifth time…that month.
I laugh out loud. “What story?” I try to fight the smile back that is obviously inappropriate as far as B is concerned.
“You roughed her up pretty good.” Arms still crossed, now cocking his head to look down at me, curled up in the leather chair in the cave, tapping my protruding bottom lip with a pencil’s butt while I doodle. Though the yellow, lined notepad in my lap is surprisingly stark for someone who’s been sitting that way for hours. “What’d she do?”
I snort out my nose, unable to fight the cocky laugh. “She opened her mouth.” Back to doodling. Or pretending to, anyway.
“She’s hardly so strong it required a concussion to sustain her.”
“You gonna’ send me to my room or somethin’?” I can feel the rubbery hard tap of the pencil swinging in, dabbing my lip.
“This isn’t a joke, Emma. There’re rules we operate by. One of them not beating someone to a pulp because they ‘opened their mouth.’ Don’t make us targets for the police.”
“Are you kidding? She’s Harley Quinn.” I obviously wasn’t understanding what made the urgency to condemn my act so dire. “She used to run with Joker, she’s almost killed you a million times. Come on!”
“And right now, she’s free and clear, a rehabilitated citizen. And from what I can tell, her only mistake was getting in your way when you thought you were on a roll.” Shit. He’s been watching me, following me. Keeping tabs. What else does he know?
“Bruce, I thought our job was to service justice? Make things right.” I try not to look like I’m worried about him spying on me.
“Not through needless, excessive force.” He’s turning around, walking away from me with a kind of infuriated stomping, shoulders hunched and piled around his neck like a juiced bouncer, needing to get away before he does something irrational to prove his point. He’s almost at the bottom of the cement stairs, leading upwards to the mansion above.
“Bruce!”
“Go home, Emma.” It echoes in the hallway as he ascends, deep and growling enough it reminds me of the clown whispering perverted rhetoric in my ears. It’s been two weeks since I saw him last. I start to wonder where he is, what he’s doing right now while I’m incurring punishment for doing what I was told to do all along. At least, it feels like that’s what I’m doing. It feels as though B is entirely wrong. That we need to physically immobilize these losers or they’ll never get the hint.
I throw the yellow pad against the ground, watch its pages swivel out of control as it fluttered anxiously to the floor where it lay strewn like a flayed carcass. I kicked it once, just to show it I meant business. Then hucked the pencil at it as though an aside to the disaster.
“Fuck. I’ve been grounded.”
It’d been weeks since I’d felt the rush of a breeze against the fragile pale skin on my face. It stung like shit – like icicles jabbing me repeatedly and salt following in each abrasion – but it felt like an awakening, a cleansing in the purifying waters of Jesus and I was saved. And the imagery made me laugh so hard it brought frozen tears to the corners of my eyes because it coincided with my pulling out mini tear gas explosives, shaped like little metallic bats, and imbedding them into the wall in front of the perp I was in pursuit of with one overhead throw. In their gaseous release, he barreled through a cloud so thick it was like fog, and the screaming came instantly when he couldn’t see and the pain was so immense he had to stop running. My laughter ensued once his screams turned into pig-like squeals. So I hog tied him, stuck an apple in his mouth, and hung him from the fourth floor window of the condemned apartment complex he’d attempted to lose me in during our chase.
“They’re gonna love you in the clink.” Smacking his cheek just before pinning a crayola-like note to his chest reading “I have the Mercedes Diamond,” and lowering him with ease over the side of the building. Before leaving, I secured the rope to the sturdiest material I could find – a stair railing. A big, thick hunk of wood, gray-white like uncooked bacon fat, jutted up from the floor. I began the knot easily enough, though halfway through I started to argue with myself regarding the state of this knot. I mechanically started a timber-hitch, knowing I needed to keep this guy held for a while, unsure when the cops would show to claim him, but suddenly started undoing it halfway through, arguing it didn’t need to be such a certain knot. I could precariously do an overhand, pretzel-like knot and call it a night. So what if it came undone during the course of the night? This guy broke the law. He should pay. And if the rope broke and he fell three stories to the broken crags of gnarled sidewalk below him, all the better. He’ll learn to never mess with me again.
So I justified my reasoning for not tying a knot at all. I swung the working end round the meat of the stake, hooked it a few times within itself, and took the roof towards downtown, feeling happier than I had in a long time at having finally felt the sweet success of justice without its sugar coated complexity overpowering it. Sure, he’d probably just hang there without so much as a slip of the rope, but the chance of it slipping had been drastically increased, and as I dove between alleyways and the gaps between skyscrapers, futuristic earthquake safe towers, and gothic cathedrals withstanding the test of time, I mentally patted myself on the back and couldn’t wait for the next cretin to cross my path. I was gonna’ make an example out of all of them.
For five nights in a row I put the unjust in their place. Fathomed unthinkable obscenities flung from the mouths of careless, infantile henchmen, minced words with a bird-loving gambler many would call a traitor to his kind, and roughed up a ditzy blonde – attempting to exact rule while trying not to make it appear personal, or obvious, or connected on any level by a third party we intimately knew. But taking it a little too far seemed suddenly necessary, and it being excessive didn’t stave off the satisfaction of watching her get hauled off in the back seat of a squad car. It felt good. Warranted. I was finally winning.
“What’s the story with Harley?” B is hovering over me – cemented, pensive, arms crossed as though my middle school principal wanting to know why I super glued Tommy’s hands to the wood bench in the girl’s locker room…for the fifth time…that month.
I laugh out loud. “What story?” I try to fight the smile back that is obviously inappropriate as far as B is concerned.
“You roughed her up pretty good.” Arms still crossed, now cocking his head to look down at me, curled up in the leather chair in the cave, tapping my protruding bottom lip with a pencil’s butt while I doodle. Though the yellow, lined notepad in my lap is surprisingly stark for someone who’s been sitting that way for hours. “What’d she do?”
I snort out my nose, unable to fight the cocky laugh. “She opened her mouth.” Back to doodling. Or pretending to, anyway.
“She’s hardly so strong it required a concussion to sustain her.”
“You gonna’ send me to my room or somethin’?” I can feel the rubbery hard tap of the pencil swinging in, dabbing my lip.
“This isn’t a joke, Emma. There’re rules we operate by. One of them not beating someone to a pulp because they ‘opened their mouth.’ Don’t make us targets for the police.”
“Are you kidding? She’s Harley Quinn.” I obviously wasn’t understanding what made the urgency to condemn my act so dire. “She used to run with Joker, she’s almost killed you a million times. Come on!”
“And right now, she’s free and clear, a rehabilitated citizen. And from what I can tell, her only mistake was getting in your way when you thought you were on a roll.” Shit. He’s been watching me, following me. Keeping tabs. What else does he know?
“Bruce, I thought our job was to service justice? Make things right.” I try not to look like I’m worried about him spying on me.
“Not through needless, excessive force.” He’s turning around, walking away from me with a kind of infuriated stomping, shoulders hunched and piled around his neck like a juiced bouncer, needing to get away before he does something irrational to prove his point. He’s almost at the bottom of the cement stairs, leading upwards to the mansion above.
“Bruce!”
“Go home, Emma.” It echoes in the hallway as he ascends, deep and growling enough it reminds me of the clown whispering perverted rhetoric in my ears. It’s been two weeks since I saw him last. I start to wonder where he is, what he’s doing right now while I’m incurring punishment for doing what I was told to do all along. At least, it feels like that’s what I’m doing. It feels as though B is entirely wrong. That we need to physically immobilize these losers or they’ll never get the hint.
I throw the yellow pad against the ground, watch its pages swivel out of control as it fluttered anxiously to the floor where it lay strewn like a flayed carcass. I kicked it once, just to show it I meant business. Then hucked the pencil at it as though an aside to the disaster.
“Fuck. I’ve been grounded.”
Chapter 10
Looooong chapter...
Chapter 10
I left. I walked. I knew walking. I was its companion over the months, years, decades I’d known it intimately. The feeling of legs gently swinging and pulling, yanking me forward in an endless, controlled fall. I could do it for hours, days if I had to. That I remembered. So much was coming back now that I had nothing between me and repression. Just the cold air and a silent breeze combing my hair. Nothing but tranquil dark. Not even the moon to shine a light tonight. Perhaps tonight it’d run away. But I didn’t need it to walk. I trusted my own two feet, where they’d take me regardless of sightlessness. I depended on it and it wouldn’t fail me.
I’d recruited Dee from LexCorp to make me her next guinea pig in their controversial memory swipe experiments they were conducting for abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder survivors. Their pitch? That they could erase – with psychological therapy and a little medicated encouragement – all of your past memories that were hindering you from getting on with your life. Instead of a shrink, you could have these guys perform memory suppression therapy and if it worked, you walked out with only the good stuff. Happy bunnies, pool parties, mom’s apple pie – and forget the time dad raped you and made your brother watch, or the mass grave you had to dig for Pol Pot in Cambodia that tortures you every night when you think about the wailing of innocent people, buried alive. Or, maybe thoughts of an ex boyfriend that were just getting in the way of your constant success at ruthless infamy. Things like that. Truth be told, it had been doing a lot of good for a lot of people. The only side effect was that sometimes it didn’t work, and a few of the other medication-type side effects: dry mouth, hot flashes, etc. Shit like that. I knew I could handle it and when Dee had told me about it a few months before they started, I’d pretended not to care. But in reality, I’d memorized every word she said.
“It’s experimental…still in its first stages. Are you sure you wanna’ do this? I mean, I’d feel responsible if it didn’t…you know…work.” She looked oddly out of character in a white lab coat and big black Buddy Holly glasses, which is not how I remembered her back in California. When I thought she’d killed herself from my constant torture, when her parents up and moved out of nowhere after what I thought was her death. After Tommy and I had joked about it, writhed in hilarious laughter about it, for hours. That moment abruptly shattered when we came face to face during a robbery I didn’t orchestrate, but was merely a player. We – the dozen of us – were all invisible players on the team of novices recruited for this stupid little practice session that predictably went sour. After splitting in all directions, me and this other person, both of us in masked getups not too far removed from those of Ninjas, hid out in the barrel end of a parked cement truck for the entire night and got re-acquainted.
“Jesus, are ya’ kidding? You can do this to me, Dee, and you know I’ll walk outta’ here fine. So, let’s just get it over with. The quicker I get him outta’ my system, the better.”
She sighs. “You have the paperwork?”
“What?” I’m lying on a chair, waiting for hypnotism, Rorschach inkblot tests, and David Copperfield to all jump out at once to magically transform my mind.
“Your identity, the person you plan on being when we’re done? Remember? Your idea, not mine. You said you wanted a change or something.”
I reach into my backpack I’d been literally carrying with me for five years. Torn, filthy, corners seeping in I-don’t-know-what, but it was loyal. It had never failed me, and pulled out a file folder, filled to the brim with two separate sets of identities. The one I was originally, the one I was going to hide, and the one I was going to reinstate. Just two.
“Elvira Mathers…” She’s perusing the documents, checking them out, figuring what we’re going to do with them if this all works out. “So, this is the one you wanna’ burn, right?”
“My sister, right.”
She pauses. “How far back does this identity go, exactly?” She spins around to face me, leaning against the metal doctor’s table with papers strewn across it. “Cause in middle school, I remember calling you Emma, but got confused in high school when we all started callin’ you Elvie.” She shakes her head, smiling almost as if entertained by the notion I’d concocted this scheme long before anyone would’ve been wise to it. “But we were just kids, you know. I think I just blew it off like it was nothing.”
“That was the idea.” I lean back again, resting my head on the headrest as hard as a brick. “I started that up when I was 11. It was funny. Mom and dad never claimed her for dead, you know? They just never did. No funeral. No memorial. Not even an obituary. It’s as if she’d never existed, but she was still there. They would talk about her to people, pretend she was still alive. Make up things she was doing so they could brag about the daughter they were so proud of.” I’m fidgeting, picking at the hangnail on the right side of my right thumb, picking and digging, hoping to alleviate the pain I’ve created. “They just…ignored me.” I suddenly stop. Put on a happy face for her. “So I decided the only way they’d be proud of me, is if I became her. So I did. And she’s the most fucked up person I know.” I giggle a little, because it is sort of funny. Turning it on my parents like that. Well, maybe not so much my mom, but my dad – stepdad – I didn’t mind the mindfuck it gave him, not in the least. He deserved every second of that disappointing downward spiral, but I can see Dee isn’t as enthusiastic about it as I’d hoped. More disinterested if anything.
“What about Emma? What about you? The real you?” She’s readying some solution, a solvent of the mind, if you will, to inject for the first part of the procedure. She gave me some very rudimentary explanation of everything that would take place. I sort of filled in the gaps myself with what I knew already. This sucker would evidently hone in my memories that carried certain chemical traits, characteristics my brain attached to them subconsciously. Telltale little red flags, sort of. Apparently, this solution was so advanced, it was smarter enough to distinguish between memories to keep and memories to ditch. And not ditch in a literal sense. Just push under, subdue and make them so slight that they could easily be forgotten. It’s like it made space for other good memories to come to the surface, moved things around, reorganized what I made valuable in my recollection so something else could become priority. Maybe the time I first learned to swim.
“I played both pretty good, but most of the time, I was Elvira. I just liked being her more. Yea, Emma did things too, but Elvira was more exciting. More potent. More fun. Emma was a do-gooder. I had to ditch her.” I talked like they were two distinct personalities within me, both fighting for control of my body. One obviously got the best of me. The Elvira half was much more entertaining. “But if I’m gonna’ start over, I need to be myself again, but with Elvira’s knowledge, ya know? It’ll be a clean slate. No Tommy, no mom, no dad, no nothing. Just me and…me. I mean, no one will be lookin’ for me. They’ll be lookin’ for my sister, if they’re even wise to it.”
“Are you sure about this?” She’s crackin’ me up, pretending this is really life or death.
I grab her by the collar. “Just. Do. It.” I let her go and she backs off, not because she’s scared or anything. I know better than that. Dee doesn’t scare easily. But because she hates being told what to do. Especially by me. “And don’t forget to burn all of Elvira’s shit. Her birth certificate and social are all in there.” I point one last erect finger at her. “Don’t…burn my stuff.”
“Yea, yea. I got it. Calm down.”
Then blank. For a time.
It was more than silent the entire walk to Dee’s apartment. Save for the clicking of my boots on broken crags of cement they called a sidewalk around here, I heard nothing. Again, being deaf dawned on me, took me on a time warp to the past, recalled my present, and somehow it would prescribe my future. I swiveled my wrists in front of me, danced my fingers about the little space in front of my torso, and spoke to myself in sign. Not saying anything pertinent, just talking aloud…silently. And I remembered.
It came at me like a flash, like a strike of lightning to my memory. My walking down this same street, but it was daylight. I remembered I felt as though I’d been asleep, maybe in a coma, I wasn’t tired. I was wide awake, but nothing made sense. I circled myself, and saw nothing but strangers. I didn’t recognize the towering buildings, garbage littered streets, or the dense, lingering stink. It was new to me…and yet, I’d been here before.
“Excuse me, miss. I’m so sorry…” I bumped into the overly cautious, apologetic gentleman when I had my back turned, stepping in the wrong direction, trying to get my wits about me. Fingers stuck out in front of me, mid-sign, as I spun around to meet him face to face. A nice, kind face. Bruce’s face. I remembered.
“Um…” I must’ve looked as though I was about to drain tears because his face sank in response to my stare. “I…” I couldn’t speak. I wanted to ask where I was. I wanted to know if he knew me, if I lived here, if he could tell me where I’d come from and why I was walking aimlessly, dressed like a bum in rags.
“Are you…okay?” He didn’t look pitiful. He looked concerned. It’s what I’d always liked about him. He never felt sorry for me. He never attempted to brush me off by digging in his pockets for loose change so I’d beat it. He just took my hand and I followed him wherever he led, which happened to be an empty diner nearby. A hole in the wall outside, but a deep midnight blue inside with matching leather seats at each booth and hazy Formica tabletops like the midnight sky, sparkling with distant stars. I remember running my fingers over them simply, as though connecting the dots in the hopes I’d get answers that way.
We spoke. Well, he spoke. I listened. Mostly questions about me, about where I came from, if I had a place to go, if I needed some kind of help. Something charitable, he meant. I just played counter games with my index, mapping bunnies, Chevy Novas, and a jester’s chapeau, complete with bells.
“What’s your name?” He placed a complacent and gentle palm – much larger than my own, it almost looked like a gorilla’s – on top of my shaking and agitated one.
“Emma.” It fell out instinctively. I didn’t need to think about it. “Emma Mathews.”
I pass the same diner in the middle of the night, my boots clicking to a stop in front of the barred up door, condemned for the time being. Through the fogged windows I could still see the booth we shared that afternoon, empty and piercing me with a loneliness I’d recently noticed and begun to cultivate. Ever since he’d come into my life.
I hadn’t realized I was standing in front of Dee’s apartment building for something like ten minutes, reflecting on my sudden nausea, gripping my abdomen as though an alien were going to pry its way out any moment and sing, and I was gonna’ be ready for it. But something caught my attention in the cracked pane glass window that spanned the lobby. With its torn couches bleeding cotton mush out the corners like car accident victims, and broken legged coffee and end tables with packing tape surgically holding them upright, it looked as abandoned as the diner. If it weren’t for the single blinking light bulb swinging back and forth over the mailboxes, I might not have really noticed, but there was Dee’s mailbox, stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with letters, envelopes, bills, and catalogs. Some had fallen onto the yellow linoleum, unable to fight for space in the tiny metal opening.
I pushed through the door, bending over to collect her strewn mail, holding it in my arms like a newborn baby to coddle. All the while, I checked dates and notes of interest – overdue bills, a letter post marked a week before, something marked ‘return to sender’ and a very professional looking stamp on the front that I didn’t recognize at the time – and shoved it all in my purse. And I didn’t even wait for the elevator. I ran up the stairs to the fourth floor, almost slipped u-turning around the staircase, and rushed down the hall to her door at the end.
I knocked. Rapidly. No answer.
“Fuck, Dee. Where are you?” I knocked again. Still nothing. So I tried the knob. It was open.
I didn’t walk in right away. I actually dropped my hand once the first creak of the door sounded with my little push. I flicked my fingers, flung my wrist as if the knob was scalding hot and burnt me, as though I was walking into an apartment oozing with fire. But it wasn’t even close. It was black as the night outside and without the moon to shine through her windows, it looked more like an unwelcome cave.
“Dee?” I whispered loudly, peeping my head through the crack, hoping my eyes would adjust quickly. “Hey. Dee?” I stepped in, but brought my foot back out as though doing a deranged hokey pokey, checking for quicksand or an opening in the floor or something. But I was more impatient than I was frightened, so I took a deep breath and clicked on the lights.
The apartment appeared the same. Just as I’d remembered it last. Maybe a month or two before, when I’d picked her up at home for whatever reason and had to come up to get her, being the kind of person who was always running late. A little worse for wear, a dirty cup still sitting on the coffee table, a blanket bunched up at the couch’s end, as though she’d been calm and cozy with her cup of whatever and had to get up for some reason, shoved the blanket off herself, and never returned. No signs of a struggle, nothing toppled over, so where was she? Why hadn’t she picked up her mail?
Empty bedroom. Empty fridge, as usual. Clothes remained. She hadn’t suddenly up and moved. My personal panic was getting in the way of my deductive skills. I couldn’t figure anything out. It was as if she just vanished, but it couldn’t be the case. She was somewhere. Maybe there was an emergency and she was at the hospital. Maybe she was hurt?
No. She would’ve called. Someone would’ve called. I was her emergency contact. I’d heard nothing, seen nothing, not even whispers on the street. I crunched my fingers over what felt like a wool coat lying over the couch beside me, tickling the softness, all the while becoming more afraid, more emotional, because my mind was running in circles like mad, creating every shitty scenario my warped brain could conjure.
I tried to exit the apartment as calmly as I could, not draw any attention, but my apprehension about the whole thing wouldn’t go away. I was scared as hell because my first thought was Lex had gotten a hold of her, something to do with me, the whole fiasco, which according to my memory, had gone ridiculously awry considering I couldn’t place what happened between the time she lobotomized me and meeting Bruce on the street. That didn’t just make it dangerous, it made it my responsibility.
Hitting the sidewalk outside, I thought to run back to B’s, to let him know what was going on, what my thoughts were, but I stopped myself almost instantaneously. That would require an explanation I couldn’t avoid. It would all come out then. My past, my memories, my recent sexual escapades. I couldn’t do it. There had to be another way. It was up to me to figure out on my own – no partners, no bosses, no inside lovers to clear me. Alone.
So I took a deep breath…and I walked. I know walking. We’re old friends.
Chapter 10
I left. I walked. I knew walking. I was its companion over the months, years, decades I’d known it intimately. The feeling of legs gently swinging and pulling, yanking me forward in an endless, controlled fall. I could do it for hours, days if I had to. That I remembered. So much was coming back now that I had nothing between me and repression. Just the cold air and a silent breeze combing my hair. Nothing but tranquil dark. Not even the moon to shine a light tonight. Perhaps tonight it’d run away. But I didn’t need it to walk. I trusted my own two feet, where they’d take me regardless of sightlessness. I depended on it and it wouldn’t fail me.
I’d recruited Dee from LexCorp to make me her next guinea pig in their controversial memory swipe experiments they were conducting for abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder survivors. Their pitch? That they could erase – with psychological therapy and a little medicated encouragement – all of your past memories that were hindering you from getting on with your life. Instead of a shrink, you could have these guys perform memory suppression therapy and if it worked, you walked out with only the good stuff. Happy bunnies, pool parties, mom’s apple pie – and forget the time dad raped you and made your brother watch, or the mass grave you had to dig for Pol Pot in Cambodia that tortures you every night when you think about the wailing of innocent people, buried alive. Or, maybe thoughts of an ex boyfriend that were just getting in the way of your constant success at ruthless infamy. Things like that. Truth be told, it had been doing a lot of good for a lot of people. The only side effect was that sometimes it didn’t work, and a few of the other medication-type side effects: dry mouth, hot flashes, etc. Shit like that. I knew I could handle it and when Dee had told me about it a few months before they started, I’d pretended not to care. But in reality, I’d memorized every word she said.
“It’s experimental…still in its first stages. Are you sure you wanna’ do this? I mean, I’d feel responsible if it didn’t…you know…work.” She looked oddly out of character in a white lab coat and big black Buddy Holly glasses, which is not how I remembered her back in California. When I thought she’d killed herself from my constant torture, when her parents up and moved out of nowhere after what I thought was her death. After Tommy and I had joked about it, writhed in hilarious laughter about it, for hours. That moment abruptly shattered when we came face to face during a robbery I didn’t orchestrate, but was merely a player. We – the dozen of us – were all invisible players on the team of novices recruited for this stupid little practice session that predictably went sour. After splitting in all directions, me and this other person, both of us in masked getups not too far removed from those of Ninjas, hid out in the barrel end of a parked cement truck for the entire night and got re-acquainted.
“Jesus, are ya’ kidding? You can do this to me, Dee, and you know I’ll walk outta’ here fine. So, let’s just get it over with. The quicker I get him outta’ my system, the better.”
She sighs. “You have the paperwork?”
“What?” I’m lying on a chair, waiting for hypnotism, Rorschach inkblot tests, and David Copperfield to all jump out at once to magically transform my mind.
“Your identity, the person you plan on being when we’re done? Remember? Your idea, not mine. You said you wanted a change or something.”
I reach into my backpack I’d been literally carrying with me for five years. Torn, filthy, corners seeping in I-don’t-know-what, but it was loyal. It had never failed me, and pulled out a file folder, filled to the brim with two separate sets of identities. The one I was originally, the one I was going to hide, and the one I was going to reinstate. Just two.
“Elvira Mathers…” She’s perusing the documents, checking them out, figuring what we’re going to do with them if this all works out. “So, this is the one you wanna’ burn, right?”
“My sister, right.”
She pauses. “How far back does this identity go, exactly?” She spins around to face me, leaning against the metal doctor’s table with papers strewn across it. “Cause in middle school, I remember calling you Emma, but got confused in high school when we all started callin’ you Elvie.” She shakes her head, smiling almost as if entertained by the notion I’d concocted this scheme long before anyone would’ve been wise to it. “But we were just kids, you know. I think I just blew it off like it was nothing.”
“That was the idea.” I lean back again, resting my head on the headrest as hard as a brick. “I started that up when I was 11. It was funny. Mom and dad never claimed her for dead, you know? They just never did. No funeral. No memorial. Not even an obituary. It’s as if she’d never existed, but she was still there. They would talk about her to people, pretend she was still alive. Make up things she was doing so they could brag about the daughter they were so proud of.” I’m fidgeting, picking at the hangnail on the right side of my right thumb, picking and digging, hoping to alleviate the pain I’ve created. “They just…ignored me.” I suddenly stop. Put on a happy face for her. “So I decided the only way they’d be proud of me, is if I became her. So I did. And she’s the most fucked up person I know.” I giggle a little, because it is sort of funny. Turning it on my parents like that. Well, maybe not so much my mom, but my dad – stepdad – I didn’t mind the mindfuck it gave him, not in the least. He deserved every second of that disappointing downward spiral, but I can see Dee isn’t as enthusiastic about it as I’d hoped. More disinterested if anything.
“What about Emma? What about you? The real you?” She’s readying some solution, a solvent of the mind, if you will, to inject for the first part of the procedure. She gave me some very rudimentary explanation of everything that would take place. I sort of filled in the gaps myself with what I knew already. This sucker would evidently hone in my memories that carried certain chemical traits, characteristics my brain attached to them subconsciously. Telltale little red flags, sort of. Apparently, this solution was so advanced, it was smarter enough to distinguish between memories to keep and memories to ditch. And not ditch in a literal sense. Just push under, subdue and make them so slight that they could easily be forgotten. It’s like it made space for other good memories to come to the surface, moved things around, reorganized what I made valuable in my recollection so something else could become priority. Maybe the time I first learned to swim.
“I played both pretty good, but most of the time, I was Elvira. I just liked being her more. Yea, Emma did things too, but Elvira was more exciting. More potent. More fun. Emma was a do-gooder. I had to ditch her.” I talked like they were two distinct personalities within me, both fighting for control of my body. One obviously got the best of me. The Elvira half was much more entertaining. “But if I’m gonna’ start over, I need to be myself again, but with Elvira’s knowledge, ya know? It’ll be a clean slate. No Tommy, no mom, no dad, no nothing. Just me and…me. I mean, no one will be lookin’ for me. They’ll be lookin’ for my sister, if they’re even wise to it.”
“Are you sure about this?” She’s crackin’ me up, pretending this is really life or death.
I grab her by the collar. “Just. Do. It.” I let her go and she backs off, not because she’s scared or anything. I know better than that. Dee doesn’t scare easily. But because she hates being told what to do. Especially by me. “And don’t forget to burn all of Elvira’s shit. Her birth certificate and social are all in there.” I point one last erect finger at her. “Don’t…burn my stuff.”
“Yea, yea. I got it. Calm down.”
Then blank. For a time.
It was more than silent the entire walk to Dee’s apartment. Save for the clicking of my boots on broken crags of cement they called a sidewalk around here, I heard nothing. Again, being deaf dawned on me, took me on a time warp to the past, recalled my present, and somehow it would prescribe my future. I swiveled my wrists in front of me, danced my fingers about the little space in front of my torso, and spoke to myself in sign. Not saying anything pertinent, just talking aloud…silently. And I remembered.
It came at me like a flash, like a strike of lightning to my memory. My walking down this same street, but it was daylight. I remembered I felt as though I’d been asleep, maybe in a coma, I wasn’t tired. I was wide awake, but nothing made sense. I circled myself, and saw nothing but strangers. I didn’t recognize the towering buildings, garbage littered streets, or the dense, lingering stink. It was new to me…and yet, I’d been here before.
“Excuse me, miss. I’m so sorry…” I bumped into the overly cautious, apologetic gentleman when I had my back turned, stepping in the wrong direction, trying to get my wits about me. Fingers stuck out in front of me, mid-sign, as I spun around to meet him face to face. A nice, kind face. Bruce’s face. I remembered.
“Um…” I must’ve looked as though I was about to drain tears because his face sank in response to my stare. “I…” I couldn’t speak. I wanted to ask where I was. I wanted to know if he knew me, if I lived here, if he could tell me where I’d come from and why I was walking aimlessly, dressed like a bum in rags.
“Are you…okay?” He didn’t look pitiful. He looked concerned. It’s what I’d always liked about him. He never felt sorry for me. He never attempted to brush me off by digging in his pockets for loose change so I’d beat it. He just took my hand and I followed him wherever he led, which happened to be an empty diner nearby. A hole in the wall outside, but a deep midnight blue inside with matching leather seats at each booth and hazy Formica tabletops like the midnight sky, sparkling with distant stars. I remember running my fingers over them simply, as though connecting the dots in the hopes I’d get answers that way.
We spoke. Well, he spoke. I listened. Mostly questions about me, about where I came from, if I had a place to go, if I needed some kind of help. Something charitable, he meant. I just played counter games with my index, mapping bunnies, Chevy Novas, and a jester’s chapeau, complete with bells.
“What’s your name?” He placed a complacent and gentle palm – much larger than my own, it almost looked like a gorilla’s – on top of my shaking and agitated one.
“Emma.” It fell out instinctively. I didn’t need to think about it. “Emma Mathews.”
I pass the same diner in the middle of the night, my boots clicking to a stop in front of the barred up door, condemned for the time being. Through the fogged windows I could still see the booth we shared that afternoon, empty and piercing me with a loneliness I’d recently noticed and begun to cultivate. Ever since he’d come into my life.
I hadn’t realized I was standing in front of Dee’s apartment building for something like ten minutes, reflecting on my sudden nausea, gripping my abdomen as though an alien were going to pry its way out any moment and sing, and I was gonna’ be ready for it. But something caught my attention in the cracked pane glass window that spanned the lobby. With its torn couches bleeding cotton mush out the corners like car accident victims, and broken legged coffee and end tables with packing tape surgically holding them upright, it looked as abandoned as the diner. If it weren’t for the single blinking light bulb swinging back and forth over the mailboxes, I might not have really noticed, but there was Dee’s mailbox, stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with letters, envelopes, bills, and catalogs. Some had fallen onto the yellow linoleum, unable to fight for space in the tiny metal opening.
I pushed through the door, bending over to collect her strewn mail, holding it in my arms like a newborn baby to coddle. All the while, I checked dates and notes of interest – overdue bills, a letter post marked a week before, something marked ‘return to sender’ and a very professional looking stamp on the front that I didn’t recognize at the time – and shoved it all in my purse. And I didn’t even wait for the elevator. I ran up the stairs to the fourth floor, almost slipped u-turning around the staircase, and rushed down the hall to her door at the end.
I knocked. Rapidly. No answer.
“Fuck, Dee. Where are you?” I knocked again. Still nothing. So I tried the knob. It was open.
I didn’t walk in right away. I actually dropped my hand once the first creak of the door sounded with my little push. I flicked my fingers, flung my wrist as if the knob was scalding hot and burnt me, as though I was walking into an apartment oozing with fire. But it wasn’t even close. It was black as the night outside and without the moon to shine through her windows, it looked more like an unwelcome cave.
“Dee?” I whispered loudly, peeping my head through the crack, hoping my eyes would adjust quickly. “Hey. Dee?” I stepped in, but brought my foot back out as though doing a deranged hokey pokey, checking for quicksand or an opening in the floor or something. But I was more impatient than I was frightened, so I took a deep breath and clicked on the lights.
The apartment appeared the same. Just as I’d remembered it last. Maybe a month or two before, when I’d picked her up at home for whatever reason and had to come up to get her, being the kind of person who was always running late. A little worse for wear, a dirty cup still sitting on the coffee table, a blanket bunched up at the couch’s end, as though she’d been calm and cozy with her cup of whatever and had to get up for some reason, shoved the blanket off herself, and never returned. No signs of a struggle, nothing toppled over, so where was she? Why hadn’t she picked up her mail?
Empty bedroom. Empty fridge, as usual. Clothes remained. She hadn’t suddenly up and moved. My personal panic was getting in the way of my deductive skills. I couldn’t figure anything out. It was as if she just vanished, but it couldn’t be the case. She was somewhere. Maybe there was an emergency and she was at the hospital. Maybe she was hurt?
No. She would’ve called. Someone would’ve called. I was her emergency contact. I’d heard nothing, seen nothing, not even whispers on the street. I crunched my fingers over what felt like a wool coat lying over the couch beside me, tickling the softness, all the while becoming more afraid, more emotional, because my mind was running in circles like mad, creating every shitty scenario my warped brain could conjure.
I tried to exit the apartment as calmly as I could, not draw any attention, but my apprehension about the whole thing wouldn’t go away. I was scared as hell because my first thought was Lex had gotten a hold of her, something to do with me, the whole fiasco, which according to my memory, had gone ridiculously awry considering I couldn’t place what happened between the time she lobotomized me and meeting Bruce on the street. That didn’t just make it dangerous, it made it my responsibility.
Hitting the sidewalk outside, I thought to run back to B’s, to let him know what was going on, what my thoughts were, but I stopped myself almost instantaneously. That would require an explanation I couldn’t avoid. It would all come out then. My past, my memories, my recent sexual escapades. I couldn’t do it. There had to be another way. It was up to me to figure out on my own – no partners, no bosses, no inside lovers to clear me. Alone.
So I took a deep breath…and I walked. I know walking. We’re old friends.
I really like how you are doing Bat-Man. From a third person POV, you seem to nail how he interacts with those around him. Your Joker is fucking creepy and getting creepier, but I know that's how you like it, and I know you are going to hate to hear this, but I think the new Joker Morrison is doing is going to come out quite a bit like yours.
Keep it up baby, I really like it.
P.S. I'll have a Nightingale for you soon.
P.P.S. Use Bat-Man instead of Batman, 'cause it really bugs Batman.
Keep it up baby, I really like it.
P.S. I'll have a Nightingale for you soon.
P.P.S. Use Bat-Man instead of Batman, 'cause it really bugs Batman.
It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it.
Blank Yellow (NSFW)
Hit it.
Blank Yellow (NSFW)
"Mostly Harmless Nutcase"
Thank you for thoroughly making me sick right now. I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.havokeff wrote:and I know you are going to hate to hear this, but I think the new Joker Morrison is doing is going to come out quite a bit like yours.
As long as it's only a little bit like mine...next chapter in progress!