The Further Adventures of The Joker (21 page)

Batman leaped for it, snaring the lowest rung. He rolled onto the ladder as the trap lifted flush with the roof.

The Joker was waiting for him, knife in hand. He slashed down, the box held clumsily in the other hand.

Batman rolled to one side, evading the awkward blow. He leaped to his feet.

“You’ll need more them a knife to protect yourself from me,” Batman warned. He feinted with one hand. The Joker ducked. Batman kicked out, clipping the Joker’s ankle. The Clown Prince of Crime stumbled back, brandishing the knife before him.

“No, you don’t. It may be your skull, but it’s my handiwork,” the Joker taunted. “Behave and I’ll cut you in on the royalties.”

Batman reached into his utility belt for a Batarang and clipped a length of nylon line to it. He started swinging it overhead like a bola. It made a dull warning sound like an old-fashioned roar devil.

Batman came on. To his surprise, the Joker pocketed the knife and undid his bola tie. Holding it loosely by the cords, he mimicked Batman’s stance, copying the whirling action.

“Duel of the bolas, Batman? Or is yours a bolo? I’m so bad with names. If only the cameras were running. This is priceless.” He looked behind him, toward a solitary toolshed, and began walking backwards.

Batman let fly. Simultaneously, the Joker released his bola tie. The Batarang tangled the Joker’s legs. He went down. But the tie snared Batman’s neck like a noose. The turquoise slide raced for his neck like a spider after a web-caught fly. Batman grabbed his throat and doubled over.

“Did I say
bola
?” the Joker chortled. “Well, excuuuse me. I mean
boa
—as in constrictor!”

And while the Dark Knight Detective struggled with the mechanical garrote, the Joker calmly severed the Batarang cord with his knife and stumbled toward the toolshed, the box in hand.

He undid the hasp and pulled out a hang glider with a death’s-head moth painted on the wing. Assembling it quickly, he climbed into the harness. The hatbox clutched tightly, he set himself for the run off the roof.

Back by the ladder trap, Batman had sunk to his knees, pulling on the constricting bola tie with both hands. The lower part of his face was turning a sullen lavender. His nostrils flared, straining for air.

“Don’t you just
hate
these choked-up good-byes,” the Joker squealed and began running. He vaulted into the air. The hang glider dipped unsteadily, then rose again as an updraft caught it. The Joker leaned into the wind and sent it circling back, his eyes gloating.

Down below, Batman was struggling on. One hand groped for his utility belt and brought forth a plastic capsule. He broke it against the tie clasp. There was a spurt of white smoke and the tie snapped away like a broken spring.

Batman came to his feet unsteadily, shaking off an acid-burned glove. He looked up, his cowled countenance an Art-Deco abstraction.

“Sorry I can’t stick around,” the Joker called down. “But the show must go on.” He lifted the cardboard box mockingly. “Write if you get work.”

The hang glider began to rise.

Calmly, resolutely, Batman retrieved his Batarang and pitched it.

It rose, looped, and came around in a wild impossible curve. It missed the hang glider by twenty yards on the way up.

“Nah, nah, you missed,” the Joker taunted.

His smug expression broke apart as the Batarang flashed by his purple shoulder on the way down. The hang glider listed. The Joker fought to get it level. He saw the tear the Batarang had made in the fabric above his head. His eyes went stark.

Down below, Batman caught the returning Batarang with practiced ease.

He called up. “Care to go again?”

The Joker saw that he was losing altitude. He kicked off his purple shoes. The glider rose slightly, but its downward spiral resumed immediately. Resting his chin on the control bar, he began emptying his pockets in a desperate attempt to lighten the wing’s burden. A long-barreled pistol came out, followed by a deck of razor-edged playing cards, an acid-squirting flower, and finally his knife. The roof slid out from under his woolly purple stockings and he was looking down the sickening drop to midtown Gotham City.

“Toss me the box,” Batman called. “Or I clip your wings.”

The Joker hesitated. If he could reach the roof, Batman had him. If he didn’t, Batman would send him to a hard, hard landing. Either way, the box was lost.

“Curses,” he muttered in a Snidely Whiplash voice. “Foiled again.” He pitched the box, and fought to regain equilibrium.

Batman ran to intercept it. The heavy box fell into his hands as if meant for them.

Like a limping goonybird, the Joker glided off into the sunrise. He was already out of Batarang range.

Batman stood on the parapet edge, oblivious to the fifty-story drop, and watched him go with cold empty eyes. Long after the Joker had dwindled to nothingness, he kept his eyes on the horizon.

Then, wordlessly, he walked away, the box safe under one arm.

Hours later, the box lay, still unopened, on the ebony table in the Batcave. Bruce Wayne was in costume, his cowl resting on a fresh cape next to the box.

He was talking into an untraceable phone.

“No sign of him, Commissioner?” he was saying. “I see. Yes, I agree. We’ll hear from him again. But not soon. He likes to lick his wounds awhile. At least we got the Melopopone twins.”

Wayne’s eyes went to the hatbox.

“The box? No, I haven’t opened it yet. I’m afraid I’ll have to keep what I find inside a secret. You understand. Yes. Good-bye, Jim.”

Batman hung up. His eyes went to the box again.

Alfred came down the stairs and cleared his throat.

“Don’t you think you should rest, Master Bruce? It’s noon. And you’ve not slept in nearly twenty-four hours.”

“One last item and I’m done for the night,” he said, lifting the lid.

Alfred drew closer as Batman reached into the box and withdrew the plastic-covered object.

He lifted the plastic. His jaw tightened. Alfred gasped.

The face that stared up at him was a face only in that it had eye sockets, a nose, and a mouth. The features were twisted, bloated and gouged like an elephantiasis sufferer. There was nothing recognizably human in its slick gray contours.

The gash of a mouth clamped a folded notecard. Batman pulled it free. He opened it and read the green ink message:

IF YOU HAPPEN TO READ THIS, BATS, YOU NOW KNOW MY DEEPEST, DARKEST SECRET: IN KINDERGARTEN, I FLUNKED MODELING WITH CLAY!

The note was signed “The Joker.”

Dying Is Easy,
Comedy
Is Hard

Edward Bryant and Dan Simmons

S
eeing Johnny Carson rip off his own face, just like one of those effects in an early David Cronenberg movie, was bad enough. But what came next was
truly
grotesque.

I gotta admit, I stared. But then we all had to be an appreciative audience—the goons with Uzis and MAC-10s, and H&K miniguns made sure of that. If you’re wondering how I know so much about all that cool ordnance, it’s not ’cause I spend a lot of time on the street—it’s because I see a lot of B-movies.

I really hope I live to go to a lot more . . .

The Aladdin Theater is named after the dude that rubbed a lamp and got a genie. Right now I wish I had the three wishes that guy received. All of us here on the stage do. No genie coming out tonight. Nope, just pain, blood, and a whole lot of grief.

Frankly, it’s enough to make me rethink my career . . .

I admit it, I come alive
—truly alive
—only at night. Then I descend on the concrete canyons and brick catacombs of Gotham City, take the train into its decaying downtown between Art Deco skyscrapers from some earlier age, walk its rainswept streets and ratty back alleys smelling of garbage and the homeless, seek out its basement improv clubs and East Side nightclubs sandwiched in between the porno palaces and hotsheet hotels—the clubs smelling of cigars and cheap perfume and urine and something much worse:
flop sweat
—and then, only then, in the dark belly of this dying city, performing for the drunks and adulterers and lost souls and lonely insomniacs,
then
I come alive. Then—in the dark, with the bile of fear burning at my insides and the stench of failure and humiliation just a short arc of silence away—then my
true
life begins.

I know now that I’m not alone. There are others who come alive at night, in the back alleys of Gotham City. Others who wait through the mundane turning of days for the violent whirl of night’s greatest realities. Others who shed their daylight skins and become
other people.
I know that now.

The creature that calls himself the Joker is one. The Batman—that human puzzle wrapped in a cowl and enigma—is another. I know that now.

And I almost understand.

This isn’t going well. Where to start?

My name is Pete Tulley. I’m twenty-nine years old, black—or African-American as the self-appointed spokespersons of our race now say, not married, not living with anyone right now, and during the day I’m a manager of the Burger Biggie franchise on the corner of Sprang and Robinson. It’s not really that bad of a job. The hardest part is keeping a steady flow of kids trained and working behind the counter, getting them to understand that Burger Biggie is a
job,
a responsibility, and not just a place to hang out and laugh with their friends while the customer stands and waits for his Biggie and fries. I’m a graduate of Burger Biggie Hamburger College—the franchise’s four-week training school in Peoria, Illinois—and as stupid as that sounds, as easy as it is to sneer at the idea of a Hamburger College, the chain actually stands for something (even if that “something” is only good fast food, prepared promptly to nationwide standards of taste and quality of ingredients, in clean surroundings), and I try to communicate those standards to the people I train and manage. I must be at least partially successful at that since my Biggie at Sprang and Robinson has won the Gotham City metro-area B.B. Excellence and Cleanliness Award two years running.

And despite the obvious temptation—since stand-ups are like fiction writers in that they
use
everything around them—I’ve never done hamburger franchise jokes in my routines. It seems like too cheap a shot. Plus, I owe
something
to the people who keep me employed in the daytime so I can come alive at night.

But I’ll use the gags someday. In the long run, nothing is sacred.

I’ve been a stand-up comic for three years. Three years this March. Like most would-be comics, I started by getting a laugh from my family when I was a little kid. (I remember the first time—it was unintentional—I was six and watching a Dolly Parton special on TV and said, “I bet she can swim real good with those inflated things on her chest.” If we’d been alone that evening, my mother probably would have frowned and my dad would have swatted me on the side of the head, but we had Uncle Louis and Aunt Nell and Cousin Sook and a bunch of other folks over—they’d been drinking beer since the picnic that afternoon—and the room just howled with laughter. It became a sort of family joke—Uncle Louis used to mention it about everytime we got together—and it was really the first time I’d been noticed by everyone. Or at least the first time they’d all noticed me and
liked
me.)

Anyway, it taught me that sex gets laughs, and if you can throw in some popular culture or a public figure, so much the better.

I went to Charity Hills High School—although there were no hills in our old Southside suburb of Gotham and by the midseventies there was damned little charity either—and I became a comic there just to survive. Charity Hills had inherited most of the Gotham City gangs by then, sort of gang franchises, I guess you might say, and to stay an independent you had to be incredibly smart or damn tough. I was neither. So I made myself funny.

The caption under my high school yearbook photo says “Always good for a laugh” and that was my armor and chameleon cloak. I figured that the jocks and street goons and dopeheads and musclebound dipshits who ordinarily showed their superiority by beating up wimpy types like me would think twice if I had a reputation as a clown. I figured that it might be easier for them to laugh at me—make me perform for their peers in the hallways and gyms and cloakrooms of dear old CHHS rather than stomp the crap out of me. And it worked. Most of the time.

Anyway, I started taking comedy seriously a couple of years ago, after I realized that nothing else in my life was going to give me a life worth living. I started out in the suburban improv clubs, getting in on amateur nights where people came to laugh
at
us rather than
with
us. That was okay. I was used to it. I always threw up before a performance, but I soon began to judge audience response by whether I threw up
after
the show.

I spent a long, hungry summer out in the Los Angeles area, getting booked for very few performances of my own, but getting to see a lot of the greats in the field at their old comedy club stomping grounds. The field of amateurs was too rich for me to compete out there, so I came back to Gotham City—where at least I knew a few of the club owners, had done them favors and could get a few in return. And besides, Burger Biggie doesn’t have any franchises west of the Mississippi.