Method Madness

Anne sat cross-legged in the cave of her living room, surrounded by the slow decay of a week spent avoiding herself. The only light came from the laptop on her knees, the blue of the screen turning her hands to bone and the space around her into a frozen aquarium, silent but for the drone of the neighbor's fridge and the hum of her own blood.

She had not planned to watch the clip again. She had already seen it nineteen times—once in the studio with half a dozen other people, then in the Uber on the way home, then on her phone in the hallway outside her own door, and then, finally, here: in the dark, in the half-warm, under three layers of old sweaters and with her glasses perched at an angle that was already making a red mark on the bridge of her nose.

The first thing she noticed was always the sound. The way the laugh started before the picture did, as if the man on the other side had managed to sneak his voice through a gap in the edit.

It was a laugh that came from neither lungs nor throat; it was a laugh that seemed to bloom directly behind the eyes, picking up resonance in the sinuses and then radiating outward in a frequency just below the threshold of normal hearing.

The video quality was deliberately degraded, some filter or process run in post to erase the smoothness of digital capture, but even in the pixelated mud of the opening frames, she could see the white, the green, the uncannily alive.

She'd set the player to loop, and now it was on pass number twenty, the digits in the lower corner ticking up with the mindless fidelity of a metronome. Each cycle she tried to see something new, to catch the trick, the cut, the place where acting yielded to technique. But there was nothing to catch.

If there was a magic in it, it was the magic of inevitability, the way a snake bite was inevitable, or a train wreck, or the sudden collapse of a bridge that everyone had known, somewhere in their bones, would not last the winter.

The flat was a disaster.

Coffee cups in every stage of desiccation, some with the grounds crusted to the bottom in a pattern that looked a little like a Rorschach, some with the lipstick smear perfectly preserved on the rim. The remains of three meals—Chinese, Thai, whatever the thing from the deli downstairs counted as—spread around her in a ring. She had not eaten from any of the containers in hours, but the evidence of hunger remained, each box a silent testament to the failure of comfort food to comfort.

She watched.

Joker—Marcus, she reminded herself, though even in her own head it was getting harder to keep the boundary—sat in the frame, hands folded, elbows on knees. The makeup was perfect, so perfect it looked less like makeup and more like a side effect, a medical event, some rare and beautiful disease that had consumed the man and left behind only the smile.

The eyes did not move, but every other part of the body vibrated with a micro-tremor, a readiness so total that it was almost invisible.

On the screen, Barbara cowered in the chair. Anne had played this role before, in other films, other lives: the victim, the witness, the thing meant to be broken. She had always hated those scenes, not for what they said but for how they demanded she believe, if only for a moment, that there was nothing left but survival.

She advanced the video frame by frame, using the space bar to freeze at the exact second the Joker's head tilted, a movement so small it might have been an accident, except it wasn't. In the half-second before he spoke, his hand twitched—index finger flexing, then middle, then the rest, as if counting out the syllables of a word that had not yet been invented.

The line came. It was not the one from the script, not exactly, but the script had always been more of a suggestion on this set than a law. The voice was soft, lower than the register she'd heard on set, almost gentle.

"You ever wonder what happens when you let the chaos in?"

Anne stopped the playback, went back two seconds, played it again.

The line was nothing special, out of context. But the way he said it—it was like watching someone gently lift the lid off a panther's cage, then close it again, so soft you almost didn't see the violence waiting underneath.

She let the clip run, then stopped, then ran it again, this time focusing on the mouth. The lips were red, but not the plastic red of lipstick—this was a red that looked organic, stained-in, as if the pigment had been applied from the inside out.

When the Joker smiled, it was not a smile of joy or threat, but of anticipation. She watched for the break, the moment where the mask slipped, but there was no mask.

She remembered what the makeup girl had said, that first week on set:

"He doesn't need the paint. I think it's just a way to keep the rest of us from getting too close."

Anne ran the footage again, this time watching the hands. Each time the Joker spoke, the fingers flexed in a pattern—two beats, pause, three beats, pause, then a stillness so complete that she thought the video might have frozen.

In her mind, she tried to echo the rhythm, see if it matched her own pulse.

She was not surprised when it did.

By the end of the twentieth play, she was shaking.

Not visibly, not so anyone could see, but inside, where the nerves lived.

She reached for her coffee, but the cup was empty, the bottom ringed with an oily shimmer. She set it down, careful not to disturb the other cups, then ran her hand through her hair, feeling the static lift and snap with each pass.

She watched the scene one more time, this time with the sound off, as if the silence might reveal the trick. It did not. In silence, the effect was worse—the laugh lived in her memory, superimposed over the video in a way that made the man on the screen feel more present, more invasive, more real.

Anne exhaled, slow, then replayed the exact moment she had paused on before: the tilt of the head, the glint in the eye, the line about chaos.

On the screen, the Joker smiled. It was a different smile than the one she'd seen in rehearsal, or in the table read, or even in the dailies. It was a smile that said: I know you. I know what you're afraid of. I know what you want.

Anne leaned forward, close enough to the screen that her own reflection ghosted over the image. For a second, the two faces—hers and the Joker's—merged, and she felt a jolt of something between terror and recognition.

She reached out, almost involuntarily, and touched the screen.

Her fingers traced the line of the jaw, the paint, the dark slash of the smile. The glass was cold, but the contact sent a bolt of heat up her arm, through her chest, into her face. She left her hand there for a moment, feeling the buzz of the laptop fan and the faint static of her own skin against the screen.

She closed her eyes, just for a second, and tried to remember what it felt like to be afraid of something that wasn't real.

She failed.

When she opened her eyes again, the Joker was still smiling.

She played it again.

....

When Anne finally closed the laptop, the clock said 3:14 am. Her head thudded with a caffeine migraine, but exhaustion had begun to crawl up the back of her skull, spreading in a heavy fog from the neck up.

She left the kitchen light off, shuffled to the bedroom through a maze of shoes and scripts, and let herself fall into the bed without changing, without washing her face, without even drawing the covers.

She lay on her back, eyes fixed to the line where ceiling met wall, willing her mind to empty itself. The air tasted of cold takeout and that faint, ozone note that haunted cheap electronics left on too long. She exhaled, then let go, then waited for sleep.

When it came, it came jagged.

First: darkness, thick and absolute, the kind that pressed at the inside of the eyelids and threatened to push through. Then, a flicker—a match, a grin, the white face shining in the void.

He was there, of course he was there, but not in the way she'd seen him on the screen.

Here, he was less man and more silhouette, the sharp cut of his jaw visible even when he turned his head away. The green of his hair bled into black, the skin luminous, almost phosphorescent. He watched her, unblinking, and the eyes were not emerald, not even human, just holes punched into the dark.

She tried to move, but could not.

She felt the bed vanish beneath her, replaced by an endless chair, an interrogation seat that stretched on and on into infinity. He circled her—never walking, just appearing in one spot, then another, as if her own gaze had conjured him from the air.

"You'd burn the world just to keep warm, wouldn't you, kitten?" The voice wrapped around the back of her neck, soft as a hand, tight as a collar.

Anne tried to answer, but her mouth would not move. She felt her limbs lock, felt the blood freeze inside the vein, felt a pulse throb at the very edge of perception. He reached for her—one gloved hand, moving slow, slow enough to register every detail of the leather, every crease and shine. The fingers hovered at her throat, waiting.

She jerked awake, sucked in air, found herself on the mattress, hands curled into the sheets, sweat pooling at the small of her back. The room was dark, but she could see the blue blink of her laptop in the other room, the indicator light flashing on and off, on and off, as if the device was still trying to wake her.

She closed her eyes, told herself it was just a dream, but the line about burning the world was still caught between her teeth, and when she swallowed, it went down hard.

She rolled to her side, pulled the pillow tight to her chest, and tried again.

This time, the dream began inside a corridor—a school hallway, but stretched, warped, the colors off by just a few shades. She was running, barefoot, the floor cold and slick under her feet. The walls closed in, then opened, then closed again, always narrowing just enough to make her shoulders brush the paint.

She turned a corner and there he was again, Marcus, but also Joker, but also not. He stood in a pool of light that moved with him as he drifted closer. She tried to run but her feet would not lift from the linoleum; she tried to scream but the sound froze in her throat.

He closed the distance in a single breath, then reached out, two hands this time—one to her face, one to her wrist. The touch was gentle, almost reverent, but the pressure on her skin said otherwise. He leaned in, close enough that she could see the brushstrokes of the white, the way the pigment pooled at the crease of the nose, the way the red at the mouth was not quite symmetrical.

"You ever wonder if you're the only one pretending?" he said, voice pitched just above a whisper, breath hot against her cheek.

She shook her head, or thought she did, but he laughed, the sound filling the hallway, shaking the ceiling tiles loose. He leaned in, mouth to her ear, and repeated the line from before.

"You'd burn the world just to keep warm."

She woke again, this time with a sob caught in her throat, a real one, wet and sour. She clamped a hand over her mouth, not trusting herself not to make more noise. The clock read 4:02. She had been asleep for less than thirty minutes.

The third time, the dream came as static, a chopped-up reel of images and sounds. She was on set, in the Catwoman suit, but the rest of the cast was gone, the crew vanished. The walls of the soundstage melted away, replaced by a city at midnight—neon, rain, everything slick and shining. Joker was there, on the rooftop, waiting. He gestured her over, and she went, because there was nothing else to do.

He circled her, this time slower, savoring the moment. She could feel the heat of him, could see the way the eyes never left her face. He reached for her mask, hooked a finger under the seam, and peeled it away, slow as a striptease. Underneath, she was herself, naked and exposed.

He smiled.

"We both like the mask, don't we?"

She tried to reply, but the words were gone, replaced by a heat that spread from her face down, down, into her belly and her thighs. She was sweating, though the rooftop was cold. He ran the back of his hand down her jaw, then lower, then lower still, and the touch was electric, paralyzing, the kind of contact that lived in the bones and never, ever left.

He pressed his mouth to hers, and it was not a kiss but a question: how much, how long, how deep before you break?

She bucked against him, but not to escape. She wanted more, wanted the taste of the paint, the feel of the leather, the pressure of his hands everywhere at once.

He whispered the line again, this time into her mouth:

"You'd burn the world, kitten."

She came awake with her body trembling, legs locked together, hands fisted at her sides. She was wet, wet with sweat, but also with something else, something she didn't have a name for and didn't want to.

The room was still dark. The light on the laptop had gone out, but the image of him was burned into her retinas, perfect and eternal.

She lay there, breathing hard, then soft, then hard again, and knew with certainty that sleep would never be safe again.

When morning came, she would pretend that the dreams had left her.

But even as she closed her eyes for the last time, she heard the voice, saw the smile, felt the gloved hand at her throat.

She did not try to stop it.

She let it in.

......

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