Method Madness

He woke to the world the way a diver wakes from black water—by drowning in it. First came the smell: antiseptic, ammonia, the sting of pure bleach that filigreed his nostrils and made him want to claw his nose off.

Next: the light. It roared through his eyelids, even shut, a searing white that flickered in a rhythm designed for torture or revelation.

Then the sound: nothing at first, then a thin electrical whine, and beneath it, the muffled grind of HVAC somewhere up in the drop ceiling.

He tried to move, and the world bit back. Restraints on his wrists, tight enough that his fingers went numb. Ankles, too.

He flexed against them and felt the bedsheet twist around his naked thighs. He was cold. Not just surface cold—something deeper, as if his blood had been replaced with saline and left to settle at room temperature.

When he opened his eyes, the lights stabbed in, slow and deliberate. The ceiling was a grid of fluorescent rectangles, some trembling, some dead, all ringed with brown at the edges from years of carcinogenic dust.

The walls were tile, the color of old teeth. He tried to track the seams with his gaze, but his vision jittered, and the lines kept splitting, as if the world was about to pixelate and vanish.

Movement.

To his left.

He craned his neck as far as the straps allowed, and saw a shape in white—a doctor's coat, the silhouette genderless and almost cartoonish in its precision. The figure stood with back turned, head dipped in conference with a clipboard. Its hair was a tight, gray-blond helmet, the type that never moved even when the body beneath it did.

A speaker clicked on, somewhere above.

"He thinks this world is fiction."

The voice was female, maybe, but electronically sanded down to clinical monotone.

No accent, no emotion.

The doctor did not look up.

Another click, the voice more insistent:

"Subject does not respond to traditional immersion. Reality testing inconclusive. Recommend further measures."

Marcus licked his lips—dry, almost cracked. Tried to speak. What came out was a rasp, little more than a vapor.

The doctor turned then, and he saw the face. Or didn't see it. The features flickered, blurred at the edges, the way a digital face morphs when the algorithm loses confidence. It might have been a man or a woman, forty or sixty, beautiful or hideous.

For a moment, he thought he recognized his own cheekbones, his own greenish eyes. Then it was gone, replaced by the blank efficiency of professional concern.

He tried again, louder.

"Where am I?"

The doctor approached, steps soft on the linoleum. From this distance, the face resolved into a kind of mannequin—mouth a thin line, nose too straight, the eyes flat and gray, as if borrowed from a corpse or a wax museum. The coat had no name tag. The hands were gloved, but he could see the ghost of old scars beneath the latex.

"Subject is aware," the doctor said, voice now live and direct, not through the speaker.

He wanted to laugh. Wanted to say something clever about being "the subject," but the joke caught in his throat and refused to come out.

Instead:

"I'm not supposed to be here."

The words hung in the cold, and for a second he felt the old thrill, the sense of being on stage, every syllable a test of what came next.

The doctor leaned in, close enough that Marcus could see the small red veins in the eyes, the shimmer of sweat at the hairline.

"You were found unresponsive," the doctor said, matter-of-fact.

"No ID, no contacts. Brought here for stabilization."

"I'm not crazy," he said. Or tried to. It sounded like a lie, even to him.

The doctor made a note on the clipboard.

"You are a high-risk dissociative. You have been sedated for your own safety."

Something in Marcus tensed—maybe a memory, maybe just instinct.

"How long?"

The doctor shrugged, as if the question was irrelevant.

"Does it matter?"

He tried to twist his hands out of the cuffs. The metal tore at his skin, but he kept going until his wrists screamed. The doctor stepped back, unimpressed.

"You're going to keep me here?"

"If necessary." The words were delivered with the warmth of a computer shutdown message.

He looked past the doctor, searching the corners for cameras, microphones, anything that would confirm his suspicion. Above the sink, there was a mirror—not two-way, just the cheap kind that makes your face look fatter and older than it is. He stared at it, searching for the lines of his jaw, the cut of his lip.

For a split second, the reflection changed.

It was him, but not him. The skin bleached to a sick, powdery white. Eyes ringed in black, so deep they seemed bottomless. The mouth, split with a slash of red that curled up at the corners, painted over the reality of his own. The Joker—his Joker, the one he'd birthed and buried and tried to exorcise. It leered at him, eyes bright with malice and something like hunger.

He blinked, hard. The image was gone. Just his own face now, sweat-streaked and wild, hair matted to the skull.

He shivered.

The doctor, if it noticed, did not react.

"You must rest," it said.

"The world will make more sense in the morning."

He wanted to scream, to demand proof of the world's existence, but the voice was already gone, the shape in white retreating to the far side of the room, blurring at the edges until it became just another trick of the light.

The fluorescents flickered, slow and deliberate.

He closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them, the ceiling was still there, the restraints still biting into his flesh, but now there was a thin line of laughter threading through the air—a phantom sound, too low for human hearing, but unmistakable all the same.

He tried to ignore it.

He did not sleep.

In the dark, he stared at the mirror, willing the face to return.

It never did.

Not when he wanted it to.

...

The memory found him in the walls.

He was younger, barely sixteen. The bed was a plastic tray bolted to the floor, the sheets the same moss-green as the walls, as the scrubs, as the food that slithered in lukewarm on a tray every six hours.

The room stank of mop water and despair. The window was a slit, just wide enough to admit a rectangle of light, iron bars set inside the glass in case someone found a way to become air and escape.

His hands were raw, every nail bitten past the quick, some bandaged, some crusted with old blood. He dug at the plaster with what was left of them, scraping until the white gunk packed under his nails turned the same color as bone.

He wasn't sure what time it was. Time didn't pass here so much as accumulate—days forming a sediment, burying whatever self you brought in until all that remained was the compulsion to dig your way out, one sentence at a time.

He scratched lines into the wall, right at eye level from where he sat hunched on the mattress. The plaster didn't yield easily, but he was methodical. He'd started by carving names—his, then others'—but as the days stretched into weeks, the writing had gotten weirder, more elaborate, less about memory than about something deeper.

Now it was all dialogue.

Screen directions.

Character breakdowns.

He muttered as he worked, reciting lines from films he'd never seen, or maybe he had and just didn't remember. Sometimes he invented new scenes, casting himself in roles he couldn't pronounce, the voice low and frantic so the staff wouldn't hear.

He was writing a script. He didn't know for what, only that the act of putting words into the wall was the only thing that proved he was still real.

The left wall was Act I.

The window side was Act II.

The wall facing the bed, crammed with the densest, bloodiest script fragments, was the finale.

He read it out, sometimes, when he was sure he was alone.

EXT. ALLEYWAY – NIGHT

JOKER (V.O.): You're not sick. You're just awake.

MARCUS (O.S.): Cut the scene. I don't want to be here.

He pressed his thumb into a fresh patch of plaster, the pain sharp enough to clear his head for a second. He scrawled:

(beat) He laughs but it's a scream.

Then, in bigger letters, uneven from the tremor in his hand:

IT'S ALL FICTION. I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE.

His voice cracked on the last word, echoing back at him from the empty hall.

A shadow passed outside the window in the door—nurse, maybe, or guard. He froze, hand pressed to the letters, breath hitching like a broken fan. The handle jiggled, then settled. The shape moved on, indifferent.

He resumed. The nails on his right hand were shredded, so he switched to his left. The skin at his fingertips peeled back in little half-moons, each scratch a stinging stripe.

He thought about the Joker, about how pain could be an art, about how the world would rather see you bleed than see you boring.

His blood left marks in the words, darkening some letters, making the script pulse with a kind of deranged logic.

He lost himself in it for a while, the sensation of blood and chalk dust, the whisper of his own voice tracing a story no one else would ever read.

The System's voice arrived on a pulse, low and synthetic, but this time it came from inside his own teeth.

INTEGRATION HAS BEGUN.

He startled, dropping his hand, staring around as if someone else might have heard. The room was still. Only the hum of old AC, the shuffle of someone's shoes two doors down.

INTEGRATION HAS BEGUN, the voice repeated, louder now, modulating up and down, like a tape being chewed by a dying Walkman.

He pressed his palms to his ears.

"Fuck off," he hissed.

But the voice kept going, echoing off the plaster, rippling through the text on the walls:

integration has begun

integration has begun

integration has begun

intergrat.....

int.....

i....

....

Each time it repeated, the letters shimmered. He watched, heart hammering, as the words he'd carved began to twitch, rearrange themselves, the lines crawling over each other like worms.

The edges of the plaster rippled, like heat on a summer sidewalk. The green of the walls deepened, then flickered in and out of existence, the color strobing from moss to lime to a shade of blue that had no name.

He blinked, hard. The words were all bleeding now, melting together into a slurry of vowels and threat.

He tried to stand, but his legs were dead, shot through with pins and needles. He braced on the wall, feeling the pain in his hands re-ignite as he did. The room lurched, the light from the window fragmenting into little cubes, then rectangles, then perfect pixels.

"Not real," he said.

"Not real, not real—"

But the System was louder. Now it was everywhere, in his head, in his hands, in the sting of open cuts and the metallic taste on his tongue.

integrationhasbegun

INTEGRATIONHASBEGUN

He closed his eyes, but the words were there, too, painted on the inside of his skull.

The world started to break apart, first at the edges, then in the middle.

He clawed at the wall, desperate to hold onto something solid.

But the wall was gone, replaced by a field of static, a wash of pixels and noise and the last sound of the System voice as it glitched out of existence, replaced by a different kind of silence.

He was nowhere.

No bed, no window, no green.

Just the echo of a script he'd never written, and the ache in his hands.

And the certainty that integration had already happened, and he was the last to know.

....

He came up gasping, the scream half-formed in his mouth, dying on the air before it could clear his teeth.

The kitchen was black, the only light a spill of sodium from the city thirty stories below. The cold marble bit into his palms. He'd fallen asleep standing up—no, not asleep, never asleep—just folded in on himself, arms locked, face bent to the countertop as if he'd passed out from the weight of his own breath.

He staggered back, hit the base of the island with his hip, and almost went down. Sweat stuck his shirt to his ribs, a second skin slick and freezing. He tried to orient himself: the fridge was to the left, the window to the right, and the clock on the oven blinked 2:18, every second an accusation.

He wiped his face, feeling the oil and salt, the stubble burning his hand. He checked his arms, still half-convinced he'd been bound. No straps, just the familiar black tattoos—wolves and knives and moths—stretching across skin that trembled with aftershock.

He rolled up the sleeves, one at a time, to the crook of the elbow. There, in the pale inner flesh, the faintest ghost of a scar. He ran a finger over it, slow.

Once, it had been raw, a patchwork of irritation from months of latex, glue, and the endless removal of the Joker mask. Makeup, prosthetics, solvents that stung and left the skin angry for days after.

The body remembered everything.

Even the lies you told it.

He pressed harder, tracing the network of faded marks, feeling the ache pulse from bone to surface and back again.

His hands shook. He squeezed them to fists, felt the wetness of sweat bead in the lines of his palm.

He looked up.

The fridge was stainless steel, matte enough to kill most reflections, but the city's neon found its way in. He caught his face in the warped surface: eyes huge, pupils blown, the lips drawn back so tight it looked like a rictus. He could see the Joker in there, lurking beneath the terror.

He swallowed, slow, tried to bring the breathing under control. In for four, hold for four, out for four. Standard therapy bullshit, but it worked enough to dull the edges.

The silence was surgical. The building was triple-insulated, and the hum of the fridge was the only sign the world still moved. For a second, he swore he heard the laugh—high, wet, tearing through the back of his mind—but when he snapped his head around, there was nothing.

Just the empty expanse of the kitchen, the glass and the steel, the horizon lined with a billion indifferent lights.

He let out a breath.

It shook on the way out.

He let his hands fall to his sides, the fingers unwilling to unclench.

He stared at the city until his eyes watered, the blood rushing in his ears louder than any voice that might have followed him out of the dream.

He waited.

But the laugh didn't come back.

He was alone, again, with only the memory of what he'd let inside.

The fridge clicked, the compressor turning over, and the sound was so ordinary, so utterly stupid, that for a second he wanted to cry.

He leaned his forehead against the cool, fake metal and let it hold him up.

He did not move, not for a long time.

.......

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