Jokertown Shuffle

XI

The walls were still pocked with bullet holes. Most of the glass had yet to be repaired. I hadn't let them clean up the remnants of the Temptation; brightly painted bits of wood still littered the top of my pedestal. What I could see of the Rox from my vantage point looked like a battlefield.

It was a dream or it was real, one or the other. It didn't much matter, really; dream or reality, it was starting to look the same. I was sobbing. I wept for Kelly-Tachyon; I wept for Peanut; I wept for the jokers who had died defending this place; I wept for myself and what I'd become.

Far off over the bay, the city stared back at me. Sunlight glittered from the Manhattan towers. New York seemed to laugh at me.

"I hate you!" I screeched to the city. "I hate what you've done and what you've made me do."

A voice interrupted my tirade. "Hey, you just grew up, Fatboy. That's all."

I glanced down. The penguin stood at the top of the stairs in front of me. It scuffed at bits of the painting with its webbed feet.

"You're dead," I told it. "I saw you die."

It shrugged. "So what? Now I'm alive again. Birth, rebirth. You know-the never-ending cycle."

"Did I bring you back to life?" I asked. The question seemed important somehow.

"You tell me."

Such a strange thing, to see the creature standing there and not be able to hear its thoughts. "Okay, yes I did," I told it. I was certain of it in that instant, then in the next not so sure at all. "Maybe. Somehow," I hedged. I laughed, bitterly. "If I did, it's another useless talent I can't control, like everything else. If I were going to bring someone back, it'd be Peanut. I can't even do that in my dreams, can I? None of this is real."

The penguin looked smug and amused. "Hey, you have a thousand jokers living in your damn caves, so you'd better hope your dreams are 'real,' huh?" Then it squinted its eyes under the funnel and cocked its head. It looked at me very seriously. "God knows what the Rox could be… if you put your mind to it," it said.

That made me laugh. "I did put my mind to it. I made the Rox a charnel house."

"Right. Wallow in guilt. But consider this-wouldn't you do it again if you had to?"

I thought about it. I was still angry.

"I can read your thoughts," the penguin said to me. "Yes, you'd do it. You laughed, Bloat. You chuckled while the nats died. You enjoyed the feeling revenge gave you."

Yes, I remembered. In those moments, I'd felt strong. They deserved what they'd gotten, the nats. They all deserved it. I'd only given them justice.

The penguin cocked its head at me; the funnel hat tilted and almost fell off. "You still feel it, don't you," it said.

"Feel what?" I almost asked, but then I knew. I knew.

I could sense the same thundering underneath all the chatter and noise in my head, the same bass pounding I'd felt when I'd called forth Anthony's demons to kill. That powermy power-was still there, still fueled by all the bile and anger in the Rox. That vigor, that energy, was mine, as much mine as my horrible slug-mountain body.

"Yes," the penguin hissed contentedly, as if it were reading my thoughts again. "That's it. Go ahead. Do it!" So I did.

I looked at New York and the glittering, mocking expanse of skyscrapers again. "You hate us," I said to the city.

"Fine. Well, this is my dream. Inside the Wall, I can sculpt my world whatever way I want."

I touched the seething mass of energy with my mind and let it flow out, out across the Rox to my Wall. As the energy coursed along the periphery, I let it shape the boundary. An artist, I drew a new wall.

The penguin started to laugh. All around me, jokers were pointing out to the bay.

Far out in the water, under the false green and stormy sky of my dreams, the Wall was becoming solid. It flickered with dark lightnings and then slowly hardened. Where my thoughts flowed through and past, they left behind what was indeed a Wall, a massive thing of stone and brick a hundred feet high-an edifice that giants would have built. I played with it, using the power like a fine chisel. My whim gave the Wall great oaken gates banded with steel and barred with portcullises that a Titan couldn't have shaken loose. Towers sprouted along its length, barbicanned and tall.

Now I imagined a great arc of a bridge, and the power flashed outward visibly with the thought, painting a delicate structure as thin as a hair that spanned the wall. Unsupported, it touched the ground by the Administration Building and then again in the bay just outside the wall, pointing toward Battery Park. The bridge was wide enough for only two people to walk abreast. There were no handrails, and the span glittered as if it were made of glass.

I looked at my handiwork, liked it, and made a second bridge coming over the wall from the Jersey shore. I solidified the Wall all around, and when I'd done that, turned my attention to the Administration Building itself.

The power was still snarling and arcing, still powerful. I turned it loose again.

I remembered how the building had looked in the other dreams I'd had: a fairyland, a crystalline castle pricking the sky with impossibly high and thin turrets, ramparted and moated, an architectural fantasy born equally of Disney, Bosch, and Escher.

A place where all manner of oddities might walk.

I molded the energy in my mind, shaped it, and placed the image over my drab reality. And, oh yes, added two more things: the Temptation, whole again, and me, shaped as the Outcast.

I shut my eyes. There was a flash that made everyone gasp. The Rox shuddered as it had when the caverns had been formed. When all was still again, my jokers were gasping in amazement. I kept my eyes closed. I didn't have to look. I didn't want to look.

"Bloat?"

That was Kafka's voice, all too real. I shook my head, not wanting to come out of my dream.

"Bloat, please!" he insisted.

I opened my eyes resentfully. Kafka was gaping at me, at the penguin who stood alongside him, at the landscape around us. The penguin chuckled. It sounded remarkably like me.

It was the dream. Or rather, I might never have been dreaming at all. I began to laugh uproariously.

The Wall of stone circled us out in the bay. The faerie bridges arced into the sky. I could see the crystal castle all around me.

Everything was still here. All of it. I'd created this vision of the Rox; I'd made it as surely and deliberately as if I'd shaped it from clay with my own hands.

Except… the Temptation was yet shattered, utterly destroyed. And me-I wasn't the Outcast, but Bloat. But I found that my two failures didn't matter to me, not against the wonder of all the rest.

"Bloat," Kafka whispered, wonderingly. He couldn't keep his gaze still. It went from me to the penguin to the dazzling landscape around us. "Did you-"

"Yes," I told him. "Yes, I did."

I sniggered and guffawed, giddy and faint from the exertion.

"I did," I repeated. "It's mine."

I couldn't stop giggling. This was actually hilarious, you know. All that time I'd spent listening to the thoughts of Blaise and the jumpers and how they liked stomping nat ass and humiliating them, and I never really understood why. I thought they were stupid and juvenile. I didn't think they were right.

But now… now I'd experienced some of their blood-fed emotion too. I'd felt it when I'd let loose the demons; I felt it now, looking at the Rox's new landscape.

Hey, there's a definite kick in knowing you can hit back. That you can hurt them as well as being hurt.

And in the payback department, the nats have handed us jokers a world-class IOU.

"Oh, you're going to hate me, all right," I told the tips of the skyscrapers sticking over my wall like burrs. The power in my head buzzed like a hornet's nest inside me, angry. "Now you're really going to learn to hate me."

And I chuckled again.