The Joker had blamed his criminal obsessions on his deformities, in turn blaming those deformities on the Batman. In the course of an attempted robbery at an industrial plant, the criminal who would become the Joker and a group of his colleagues had encountered the Batman. During the consequent mêlée the criminal fell off a catwalk into a vat of chemicals; his skin was bleached white and the musculature of his face cauterized against the bones of his jaw so that the tightened white flesh of his visage resembled a death mask. The hair all over his body turned a sickly green. Rather than being repulsed by the misfortune of surviving in that state, he embraced it, painting his lips red, affecting bizarre colorful costuming, giving himself a fanciful name. And he laughed—loudly and publicly—and the angrier his crimes, the more raucous his laughter. At first, the sole object of his rage had been the Batman, but later it included anyone or anything about which the Batman seemed to care. Then anyone who assumed a position of authority. Then, finally, anyone or anything within his reach that seemed more fortunate than he. He became fortune’s hostage-taker. The Joker eventually was responsible for the Daily Planet’s demise as one of the country’s last remaining great newspapers.
The banner headline on the Planet that last day of operation had heralded another in Lois Lane’s ongoing series of exposés about the socially objectionable activities of the superpowered, self-proclaimed hero Magog. Apparently Magog had been confiscating radioactive materials from environmental terrorist groups and dumping the materials indiscriminately into the ocean off the coast of Metropolis. No one seemed to care very much. The more famous Lois Lane had become, the less important was what she had to say. This was an ancient tautology, going back at least as far as Cassandra in Greece and King David in ancient Jerusalem, with Ms. Lane only its latest celebrity victim. Many of those who claimed to love her most had listened to her least.
The Joker was always a Priest of Chaos who delighted in the absence of any pattern or predictability in his public activities. This warped logic—such as it was—remained internal, like the self-indulgent poesy of obscure prophecy forever whispering in his ear. The reason behind the Joker’s last escape from Arkham Asylum in Gotham City—his home away from home, where he spent more of his life’s time than anywhere else—was an aging, chronic recidivist from Metropolis, who had tried unsuccessfully to bust out.
This little old man known as the Prankster had failed a psychiatric examination, probably due more to age than to inclination, and found himself interned at the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. One day he’d tinkered around with a few of the battery-operated children’s toys that Arkham’s small clinical staff kept in a “playroom,” where they observed some of the inmates who they thought might respond well to such manipulables. The Prankster had turned a little radio-controlled toy car into an explosive device, programming it to roll down the hall late at night, befuddle several electronic checkpoints along the way, and explode outside his cell door. That was evidently the idea. Instead, after the Prankster’s exploding toy had signaled the cell door to open, the groggy old man did not manage to get out of the way before the consequent blast sent him, fragmented, to whatever reward awaited him. The Joker had resided in the contiguous cell, and, upon awakening at the sound of the explosion, he’d found a crack blown in his own outermost wall wide enough to wriggle through. In the ensuing horror he did precisely that, dropped thirty feet in the dark into a drainage canal, and waded through his fellow inmates’ effluvium to freedom: a suitable exit.
As a tribute to his deceased unwitting liberator, the Joker targeted the most visible public symbol of the Prankster’s primary opponent. For years, the Daily Planet and Superman had been identified together in the public consciousness. Many of the Man of Steel’s friends worked there: Clark Kent, the editor-in-chief; Lois Lane, its most visible reporter; James Olsen, the chief of its foreign desk. The Planet was where Superman went to make his pronouncements and to express an opinion when he felt the public ought to know what he thought about something. Generally, even the nets and wire services had to quote the Planet when a big Superman story broke.
Lois Lane had been in the old Cray room when she heard the laughter. Years before, when he’d been involved in a dispute with the administrator of the reference library that his staff normally used, Clark Kent’s predecessor—the late Perry White—got it into his head to outfit the newspaper with the most powerful mainframe computer in existence. Bruce Wayne owned a Cray; so did the Pentagon; the European Union had pooled its dozen governments’ resources to buy one. Perry White had wanted a room in his own office where every news story and photograph, and every network news feature in the history of American journalism, was available to any of his reporters on a moment’s notice. Mr. White had had an old storage room outfitted to be airtight and vapor-proof, keeping it at a constant sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. When he’d realized that programming all the desired information into his new Cray would cost about thirty times as much as the computer itself and take six years to accomplish, Perry White had aborted the project. The Cray room never had been home to a Cray, but it’d become a fine repository for Mr. White’s admirable stash of cigars and, unknown to anyone else at the Daily Planet, Clark Kent’s wardrobe room of choice. The only visual access to the room had been a peephole in the door, and Clark had not needed even that degree of visibility. Lois Lane also had spent quite a bit of time in that quiet place amid the tumult of the news office, working out the structure of her big Sunday magazine pieces, probably what she’d been doing in there when the Joker had arrived, although a fortunate soul who left the building about ten minutes earlier swore that she’d seen Lois ducking into the Cray room with her husband, Clark. (Later, investigators dismissed that as unlikely.)
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” the Joker proclaimed from the landing that overlooked the City Room, “and welcome to today’s gruesome tragedy.”
No one had seen his arrival, whether he’d stepped off the elevator behind him, now locked up tight, or out of one of the stairway entrances to either end of the landing, likewise locked. We know now that he had come into the building via the roof, where police later found a small hovercraft and two armed confederates still waiting for their boss. People had looked up from their business, maybe some trying to resist or object, but no one died of bullet wounds from either of the pair of uzis in the hands of his two gunmen escorts. No one is sure exactly how it took place; no one survived.
All we do know is that the last survivor was Lois Lane, who could have laid low in the safety of the airtight Cray room, could have walked out of there eventually, but chose not to.
Late midsummer, a damp stifling day. The new air-conditioning system had been installed right around the time that Clark had the old crank-opening windows sealed. And by the time the Joker appeared on the landing, all the exits had been locked, their edges caulked from the outside.
There was a clear ceramic globe that the Joker probably had carried in under his voluminous frock coat. He made his little announcement, then dropped his globe into the middle of the room. And out came green death.
Laughing death.
All three men, the Joker and his two armed confederates, had to have stood there sucking on their oxygen filters in the City Room, watching as ninety-odd people died. Perhaps the Joker had looked around in vain for Editor-in-Chief Kent, knowing him to be in one of the inner offices somewhere, dying. He may as well have been. It was a curious, painful death, the gas from the shattered globe simultaneously tickling and irritating the back of the throat and lodging below the diaphragm, forcing the victim to expel air with a repetitive spasm resembling laughter. With no air left, the diaphragm would still pump. In the weakest victims, the diaphragm or a rib or two would rupture, puncturing the lungs and flooding them with fluid, drowning the afflicted. In the strongest, the diaphragm would create a vacuum in the chest cavity, with the implosion of one vital organ or other the eventual result. Most just suffocated. When the laughing an
d heaving ended, Lois strained to look out the peephole, seeing only prone bodies, faces frozen in a ghastly death rictus. Then she heard the shattering crash of a window.
Probably she’d called “Superman!” at the top of her lungs while piling out of the Cray room, across the field of death, toward the perpetrator, standing at the shattered window, reaching for the nylon cord and pulley rig hanging out there.
On her way across the room Lois had swiped a keyboard off a desk, and the startled Joker spun around to see the crazy screaming woman swimming through the clearing air. If the Joker’s own later account was to be believed, she’d faked out the faker—possible only because she had no intention of surviving. He’d assumed she’d been trying to get by him. He spread his legs and arms to stop her, and she flew right at his midsection, sweeping the keyboard across the madman’s face and shoving him off balance. He barely missed the shattered window.
He’d gotten hold of her belt, not letting go. Again she surprised him. Instead of struggling, she reached out the broken window and yanked on the loop of the nylon cord hanging there. Two stories above, a man yelled in surprise and grabbed the eave of the building as a loosened pulley snaked by him and carried the cord down the side of the building to the ground. The Joker would fail to escape, and so would Lois.
“This is most indelicate,” the madman said, according to his own account. “Miss Lane, isn’t it?”
Maybe she nodded at him or glowered the way she did. Then the Joker reached across a nearby desk, snatching up a big brass paperweight in the shape of the ringed Daily Planet logo and bashed in her skull with it.
Whenever Superman thought of Magog after that, the scene of his Lois sacrificing her life so the criminal would be apprehended smashed through his great tortured mind. One of the disadvantages of the kind of flawless total recall that Superman possesses is that no matter how much time goes by, memories never soften. They only become more vivid.
He’d been the first one on the scene; that was how Clark Kent died.
Clark had in fact ducked into the Cray room with his wife, but it had been Superman who left the room a moment later—before the Joker’s arrival—faster than any human eye could see, in response to a distress message coming into Mission Control from a space station about to collide with a freight module. He’d heard it interrupting a police band monitor in a nearby building, and was off in space averting the imminent disaster before the astronauts aboard the station finished communicating the details of their problem. He always had liked being in space, the absence of air giving him a respite from the cacophony that he continually had to decode in the sound bath of the Earth’s atmosphere. He’d taken a few minutes to secure the rogue pod and steady the space station, smiling and waving through a porthole at the astronauts who scrambled like excited tourists to take snapshots of their visitor.
When Superman reentered the Earth’s atmosphere, the first thing he heard was the insistent ultrasonic whine of a signal inside the wrist-watch of an old friend. He turned his trajectory steeper into a power dive, burning the air around him during descent, and for hundreds of miles people wondered and shielded their vision and prayed as the pillar of flame drew itself down the sky. He’d been too late anyway.
“You did this,” Superman thundered uselessly, stepping through the wall into the City Room of the newspaper that would never again go to press.
“Yes,” the Joker said, laughing momentarily as the steel fingers that could change the course of mighty rivers closed around his profane windpipe.
There had been ninety-two dead. Superman had reported ninety-three casualties—almost as an afterthought—while delivering his insane captive to the nearest police lockup. There seemed no more point to continuing as Clark Kent; his last close link to conventional humanity had been severed. Superman removed all the bodies from the editorial offices of the Daily Planet, along with a realistic dummy of a tall dark-haired man on which he’d planted Clark’s wallet. He’d identified each of the victims by name. Not even the commission the Governor later named to investigate the affair had thought to question those identifications, which had been supplied, after all, by Superman.
Clark and Lois Kent had made quite a bit of money in their careers, but never had found much use for it. She required few creature comforts beyond his ability to provide, and he needed only her. The funds left in their bank accounts barely covered their outstanding credit card bills, because most of what they earned had gone directly into the Jonathan and Martha Kent Foundation, which they formed shortly after their marriage. Their wills left their Midtown condominium and the old Kent property in Kansas to the foundation, which invested aggressively and provided university scholarships to needy Kansas high school seniors. Mainly as a result of the Kent Foundation, Kansas was the fourth-best-educated state in the nation by the time it became a crater.
For a few days after the Joker’s crime, Superman had wandered through the paces of his life, drifting among the clouds over Metropolis, occasionally dropping from the sky to avert a car accident or to return the contents of a picked pocket to the rightful owner. He’d slept for minutes at a time floating on the thermals. Once he’d woken several feet under the Earth, realizing after a moment that he had sleepflown over two hundred miles from the city and collided with a peak just above the treeline. After Lois’s death, the ache in the man’s soul got a little worse every day for about a week or two, then stayed about the same. It never got better.
During the time following the death of Lois Lane, the police had moved the Joker from midtown lockup to a federal detention center upriver at Pocantico. Probably Superman made a point of avoiding the scene, which would explain why, when the extensively manacled Joker got out of the police van and Magog appeared suddenly, Superman had been nowhere in sight.
“Sic semper criminalis!” Magog howled into the sky, lowering his spiked golden sceptre in the direction of the Joker’s gut. For an unjustly brief moment, the Joker had looked into the face of the true wages of madness. Then a pulse of golden energy flew from Magog’s sceptre and dissolved his stomach, liver, four ribs, and parts of two others, a lung, both ventricles of his heart, and all the surrounding muscle tissue.
The howls and scrambling of the police officers on the scene summoned Superman, who arrived in time to see the remains of the Joker hitting the ground.
Superman had sputtered, opening his mouth to say something he could not say, then snatched back his composure. Finally, he demanded of the police captain on the scene, “Arrest this man for murder.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Magog said without leaving.
Gingerly, the police captain snapped handcuffs around Magog’s wrists, the Man of Gold snickering and Superman saying nothing.
“How many murderers?” Magog shouted. “How many goons and thugs? How many crime lords? How many more misanthropes like this pile of sludge on the ground will go unpunished while we play out the charade of my incarceration?”
Still, nothing from Superman.
“How many more?” Magog impatiently tore the cuffs off his wrists but carried them in his fist, sliding into the front passenger seat of the police captain’s car. “How many more,” Magog wanted to know, “because Superman doesn’t have the stones to mete out justice?”
No reply.
“You can’t judge me,” Magog said in a calm, clear voice while riding away; Superman, who certainly could still hear him, was already miles in the sky.
Superman would say not another word in public until he testified, eloquent and persuasive, against Magog at trial a month later. Virtually everyone could hear him; virtually no one listened. The jury of twelve Metropolitans unanimously cleared Magog of all charges, and some enterprising fellow printed a mock-up of the old Daily Planet’s front page with a picture on it of Superman’s face, snapped as he had come out of the courthouse—the last clear photograph of Superman anyone would take for ten years.
Magog had become the new hero of Metropolis. And Superman the
n deserted the city that had endorsed the denial of justice to the man who killed the woman he loved.
*
For all this time since the fall of the Heartland, Magog had wandered the floor of the desert he’d created, looking futilely for things to rebuild. A stick here. A bone there. The intact wall of an old post-and-beam house lying on an evaporated riverbed.
We’d gone through a similar epiphany, Magog and I. Both of us had sought solace at some time in madness, and for both of us—for me because the Spectre had chosen to rescue me, and for him because his sheer power had prevented his mind from perceiving reality in a faulty light—this solace was elusive. My sympathies went with him: We were both humans who had made fallible choices, his, by chance, wrong.
So there he stood, scrupulously sane and still beset by poor judgment, gathering up a farmhouse from the splinters of his Holocaust. He had unmade them, and now he sought to make something again. He gathered up fiber and chips of wood, and, with the heat of that pointed rod he used to focus his power, fused the pieces in boards. Most of it would burn away, but he would use what was left to construct a house. It was mostly built now, and he carried the completed shell of the building to a flat piece of land. Maybe he intended to live there.
Having seen the Ray less than an hour before, Magog reckoned Superman was coming. The Ray traveled to and fro across the irradiated land fusing rogue ions together and clearing the earth of nuclear contamination. It was a long, slow process, akin to drawing a pencil line up and down the state until the whole expanse is covered with graphite; a job that only the Ray did well. When the land reclaimer’s thin line hit Magog, quietly rustling up a farmhouse for himself, the Ray had taken only enough time to blink and draw up into the sky, startled—long enough for Magog to see him there, but not long enough for him to care.
Kingdom Come Page 20
