I owned a Whittier original . . . a Whittier . . .
The monetary value meant nothing to me, for selling it was out of the question. I’d sell my soul to the devil before I’d part with it.
“I have a bunch of the things,” the Joker said. “From his show at the Gotham Gallery.”
“But the papers said you burned them!”
“Don’t be silly. They’re far too valuable for that, although for the life of me I can’t imagine why. The man showed not the slightest trace of talent. I burned some old canvases of my own that I was unhappy with.”
“Then . . . you still have all those Whittiers?”
“Yes. Stacked up in one of my warehouses. I forget which one, actually. I had one of my men dig that piece out for you.”
A stack of them . . . I felt weak.
“Well? Do you like it? You haven’t told me.”
“I—I can’t accept stolen goods,” I said, forcing the words past my lips.
“Too bad. I was going to give the rest of them to you as a wedding present.” The Joker shrugged. “Very well. I’ll have my men remove it and—”
“No!” I said—almost a shout. “I mean, not yet. Let me live with it a while.”
The Joker’s smile seemed to broaden. “As you wish, Doctor Lewis.”
CONFERENCE
Whittiers . . . a stack of Whittiers . . . sitting in a warehouse . . . collecting dust . . . rats nibbling at the canvases . . . clawing at the paint . . .
The image roamed my mind at will as I sat at the conference table and waited for Dr. Hills to arrive. Finally, he burst in.
“They approved it!” he cried. “The State Board of Medical Examiners approved a pre-frontal lobotomy on the Joker! Any other patient and they would have said no, but the Joker—yes! Within weeks Arkham Asylum is going to be in all the medical journals!”
As excited chatter swept the table, I felt my blood run cold. The paintings. The Whittiers. A lobotomized Joker would be so passive and tractable that he’d tell the police the whereabouts of all his stashes of loot. The Whittiers . . . my Whittiers . . . they’d be returned to the gallery . . . to be sold for millions apiece.
“When is the surgery scheduled?”
“Tomorrow morning. Doctor Robinson is flying in from Toronto tonight.”
“Maybe we should give electroshock a try,” I said.
“ECT has failed already. What’s the matter, Hal? The lobotomy was your idea. Having a change of heart?”
I hesitated. How could I protest the implementation of my own suggestion?
But that had been before I’d known about the Whittiers.
“Maybe. I think ECT deserves another chance. It could be we’re rushing this too much.”
“We have to move quickly. It was the Board’s opinion that delay will only allow opposition to organize and cause legal obstruction. They feel that if we present the world with a lobotomized Joker as a fait accompli, there will be far less protest. And we will have discharged our duty to the public. As you so eloquently stated Hal, we need definitive therapy in the Joker’s case. And that’s just what we’re providing.”
What could I say? I decided to risk everything.
“I’d like to go on record right now as being opposed to the surgery. At least at this time. I think we should explore other options first. And I’d like to call for a vote.”
They all stared at me in shock. I didn’t care. I had to stop the surgery—at least until I got my hands on the Whittiers. They were all I could think of. Even if I could only delay the surgery, it would give me time to convince Dina to move up our marriage so that the Joker could make good on his promised wedding gift. After that, I’d push again for the lobotomy.
But when the vote came, mine was the only hand raised in opposition.
SESSION NINE-B
That night I arranged another session with the Joker. I didn’t even bother going through the motions of turning on the tape recorder.
“Did you really mean what you said about giving me the other Whittiers as a wedding gift?”
“Of course,” the Joker said. “Have you set a date yet?”
I clasped my hands together to keep them from trembling. I’d always been a terrible liar.
“Yes. Tomorrow. We’ve decided we can’t wait any longer. We’re getting married before a justice of the peace in the morning.”
“Really? Congratulations! I’m very happy for you.”
“Thank you. So . . . I was wondering . . . could you tell me where you’ve stored those stolen Whittiers? I’ll pick them up tonight, if you don’t mind.”
“No. Of course not. Do you know where Wrightson Street is?”
I could barely contain my excitement.
“No. But I’ll find it.”
“Here,” the Joker said, casually freeing his hands from the restraints and picking up a pencil. “I’ll draw you a map.”
As he began to draw, I leaned forward. Suddenly his other hand flashed forward. I felt a sting in my neck. As I jerked back I saw the dripping syringe in his hand. I opened my mouth to shout for the guards but the words wouldn’t come. A roar like a subway charging into a station filled my ears as everything faded to black.
A voice, faraway, calling me through the blackness. I move toward it, and come into the light.
A bizarre, twisted face, half Joker, half normal, floating before me.
“Time to wake up, Doctor Lewis,” it says in the Joker’s voice. “Time to rise and shine.”
I try to speak. My lips feel strange as they move, and the only sounds I can make are garbled, unintelligible.
I try to move, but my hands and feet are cuffed to the chair. I can only sit and watch.
And as I watch, the Joker stares into a mirror and fits pieces of flesh-colored latex over his chin and left cheek. I only see him in profile, but as each piece is affixed, he looks less and less like the Joker, and more and more like someone else. Someone I know.
“You gave me some very bad moments there, Doctor Lewis,” he says. “For a full twenty-four hours you had me believing I’d misjudged you, underestimated you. Self-doubt is most unpleasant, even in a minuscule dose. I don’t know how other people put up with a lifetime full of it.”
I try again to speak but the result is still gibberish.
“Don’t bother,” he says. “One of the effects of that injection is a disorganization of the speech centers of the brain. But let me get back to the story of my brief episode of inner turmoil. You see, all through these past few weeks I’ve been thinking that I had you, really had you. For instance, you kept the Mercedes. I mean, if you’d really wanted to show me up, you could have sold it, bought another old Toyota junker, and given the balance to charity. That would have put me in my place. Same with the engagement ring. Oh, I know I put you in a tough spot then, but if you really had the courage of your convictions, you’d have told the lovely Dina the truth. But you didn’t. You were willing to let the very first step of your marriage be a false one. Oh, I was sure I had you.”
He pauses as he begins brushing makeup over his latex mask, then continues:
“Then you go storming into the staff conference and drop your bombshell. I was shocked, believe me. A pre-frontal lobotomy, Doctor Lewis? How audacious! It would have worked, I’m sure. I was almost proud of you when I heard. None of the other incompetents here had the brains to think of it, or the guts to suggest it. But you charged right in and told it like it was. I like that. Reminds me of me.”
I try to speak again, with the same results.
“What’s that?” he says. “You’re not like me? Oh, but you are. A while back you took me to task for being indifferent to the consequences of my actions, their tragic effects upon the individuals directly involved and upon society at large. And I told you, quite honestly, that I didn’t care. You were so self-righteous. And then what did you go and do? When you discovered that I had something you wanted, you tried to turn the staff away from your ‘definitive therapy.’
Up to that moment. I’d planned simply to disappear and, as usual, leave you all wondering how. But now I see that you weren’t concerned with what was best for society; you weren’t concerned with the responsibilities of your position here. You were concerned only with what Doctor Harold Lewis wanted. And you weren’t even honest with yourself about it.”
He lifts the mirror and holds it before his made-up face as he turns toward me. Hidden behind the mirror, he says, “See? Didn’t I say you were just like me?”
And in the mirror I see the pale, distorted features of the Joker grinning back at me.
Horror rips through me. I try to scream but it’s useless.
“That injection contained a nonlethal variation on my tried-and-true Joker venom,” he says, staying behind the mirror. “So, besides scrambling your speech areas, it has also pulled your lips into a handsome smile. I’ve completed the picture by bleaching your skin and dying your hair and fingernails green.”
Then he lowers the mirror.
I gasp as I see my own face on the Joker’s body.
“How do I look?” he says.
I struggle frantically with the manacles, trying to pull free, trying to break the arms of the chair so I can get my hands around his throat.
“Guards!” he calls in my voice. The two uniformed men rush in and the Joker says, “The patient has become violent. I think it best to carry him back to his cell as is, chair and all. I’ll order a sedative that will hold him until his surgery tomorrow morning.”
The lobotomy! Please, God! Not the lobotomy!
As they drag me from the room, I hear his soft voice behind me.
“And I’ll be sure to give Dina your best tonight.”
On a Beautiful
Summer’s Day,
He Was
Robert R. McCammon
a boy.
Junior was smiling, and the sun was on his face. He was fourteen years old, it was the middle of June and summer looked like a long sweet road that went on and on until it was out of sight, swallowed by the hills of autumn a hundred miles away. Junior walked along the street two blocks from his house, his hands in the pockets of trousers that had patched knees, his fingers clenched on bird bones. The warm breeze stirred through his shock of brown hair, and in that breeze he smelled the roses in Mrs. Broughton’s garden. Across the street, Eddie Connors and a couple of his buddies were working on the engine of Eddie’s red, fire-breathing Chevy. They were big guys, all of them eighteen years old, already getting beer guts. Junior lay in bed at night and listened to the racket of Eddie’s red Chevy roaring up and down the street like a tiger looking for a way out of a cage, and that was when the shouting rose up from the Napier house like the wrath of God and—
Eddie looked up from the work, grease all over the front of his sweat-soaked T-shirt, a smear of grease across his bulbous nose like black war paint. He nudged the guy next to him, Greg Cawthen, and then the third of them, Dennis Hafner, looked across the street and saw Junior, too.
Junior knew what was coming. His feet in their bright blue Keds stuttered on the broken pavement, where bottle shards caught the summer sun. He was a tall boy for his age, but gaunt. His face was long, his chin pointed. His eyebrows merged over a thin, sharp nose. Know why your nose is in the middle of your face? his father had asked him once. Because it’s the scenter. That’s a joke, Junior. It’s a joke. Get it?
Smile, Junior!
SMILE, I SAID!
The corners of Junior’s mouth upturned. His eyes were dark, and his cheeks strained.
“Hey!” Eddie shouted. His voice came at Junior like a freight train, and Junior stopped walking. Eddie nudged Greg in the ribs, a conspiratorial nudge. “Where ya goin’, gooney?”
“Nowhere,” Junior answered, standing on shattered glass.
“Yes, you are.” Eddie tapped his beefy palm with a socket wrench. “You gotta be goin’ somewhere. You’re walkin’, ain’t you?”
Junior shrugged. In his hands he worked the bird bones deep in his pockets. “I’m just walking.”
“Gooney’s too stupid to know where he’s goin’,” Dennis Hafner spoke up, from a mouth that looked like a puffy red wound. “Skinny little fruit.” His ugly lips spouted a sound of disgust.
“Hey, Gooney!” Greg Cawthen said, his face square and ruddy under a crewcut of red hair. “Your old man home?”
Junior squinted up at the sun. A bird was flying in the sky, alone in all that stark blue expanse.
“We’re talkin’ to ya, numb nuts!” Eddie said. “Greg asked if your old man was home!”
Junior shook his head. His heart was beating very hard, and he wished he had wings.
“Yeah, right!” Dennis nodded, and punched Greg on the shoulder. “They’ve got Gooney’s old man in the crazy house again. Didn’t you hear?”
“Is that so?” Eddie stared balefully at Junior. “They got your old man in the crazy house again? They got him locked up so he can’t hurt nobody?”
Junior’s mouth moved. “No,” he answered. He felt cold inside, as if his guts were coated with ice.
“Why’d they let him out, then?” Eddie Connors went on, his eyes narrowed into fleshy slits. “If he’s crazy, why’d they let him out?”
“He’s not . . .” Junior’s voice was weak, and he stopped speaking. He tried again: “My dad’s not crazy.”
“Sure!” Dennis let out a mean yawp of laughter. “They only put sane people in the crazy house!”
“It wasn’t . . . wasn’t a crazy house!” Junior said; it came out louder and harder than he’d wanted. “It was a hospital!”
“Oh, yeah! Big difference!” Eddie said, and again his elbow found Greg’s ribs. Greg was grinning, his teeth big and white. Junior wondered if Greg Cawthen’s bones were as white as his teeth. “So they put him in a hospital for crazy people!”
“My dad’s not crazy.” Junior looked back the two blocks to his house, the one with a big elm tree in the front yard. All the houses in the neighborhood were alike: wooden structures with narrow front porches and small, square lawns, most of the houses in need of painting, the grass dried and burnt, the trees throwing blue shadows that moved with the sun. Clothes hung on backyard lines, garbage cans stood dented and beaten, and here and there stood the hulks of old cars waiting to be hauled off to the junkyard. Junior returned his gaze to Eddie Connors, as his fingers played with the bird bones—the bones of a blue jay, to be precise—in his pockets. “He had a nervous breakdown,” Junior said. “That’s all.”
“That’s all?” Eddie grunted. “Hell, ain’t that enough?” He walked out into the street, still popping his palm with the wrench, and he stopped about ten feet from Junior. “You tell your old man it’s a free country. You tell him I can drive my car anytime I want, day or night, and if he wants some trouble he ought to call the cops again. You tell him if he wants some trouble, I’ll give it to him.”
“Nervous breakdown,” Dennis said, and he laughed again. “That’s just another way of sayin’ crazy, ain’t it?”
“Get outta here!” Eddie told the boy. “Go on, Gooney! Move it!”
“Yeah!” Greg added. And couldn’t resist another, sharp shot: “I’ll bet your old lady’s crazy in the head, too!”
“MOVE IT!” Eddie shouted, king of the block.
Junior began walking again, in the same direction he’d been going, away from the house with the elm tree in its dried-up yard and paint peeling in strips from its front porch. His father’s voice came to him, and he remembered his father sitting in front of the TV, scribbling on a yellow pad and saying this: Know what a nervous breakdown is, Junior? It’s what happens when you spend half your time keeping your mind on your work and the other half keeping your work on your mind.
That’s a joke. Get it?
Smile, Junior.
Junior did.
“Skinny little fruit!” Dennis Hafner shouted at Junior’s back. And Eddie Connors called out, “It’s a free country! You tell him that, you hear me?”
Know what normal is, Junior? It’s somebody before a shrink gets hold of him.
Smile, Junior.
He walked on, along the street layered with sunlight and shadows, his fingers grasping the bones in his pockets and his heart dark as a piece of coal.
But he was smiling, on this beautiful summer day.
Junior turned right at the next block. Ahead of him, shimmering in the heat, was the last remaining wooded hillside in this suburb. It was green and thick and held secrets. It was a wonderful place, and it was his destination.
Before he reached the end of the street, where a rugged trail led up the hillside, Junior heard the noise of sneakers on the pavement behind him. Somebody running. His first thought was that Eddie Connors had decided to chase him down, and he spun around to face his attacker and try to bluff his way out of a bloody nose. But it wasn’t Eddie Connors, or any of his ilk, at all. It was a gawky, frail-looking boy with curly brown hair and glasses, a dumb grin on his face. The boy wore a T-shirt, short pants that exposed his skinny legs, black socks, and sneakers, and he stopped just shy of running into Junior and said, “Hi, Junior! I saw you from over there!” He pointed at a house further up the block, near the intersection where Junior had turned. The boy aimed his dumb grin on Junior again. “Where you goin’?”
“Somewhere,” Junior said, and he kept walking toward the hillside.
“Can I go with you?” Wally Manfred began to lope alongside. He was ten years old, his blue eyes magnified behind his glasses, and he needed braces in the worst way. Junior thought of Wally Manfred as a little dog that liked to chase cars and follow strangers, eager to be petted. “Can I, huh?”
“No.”
“Why not? Where you goin’?”
“Just somewhere. Go on home, Wally.”
Wally was silent. The noise of his sneakers on the pavement said he was still following. Junior didn’t want him to see the secret place. The secret place was his alone. “Go home, Wally,” Junior repeated. The beginning of the forest trail was coming up pretty soon.
“Aw, come on!” Wally persisted, and he darted in front of Junior. “Lemme go with you!”
The Further Adventures of The Joker Page 6