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This weekend,
Clayface stays in.
Riddler is spewing his second-rate sphinx trash on Fifth,
Babydoll has the gatling gun out of her Lux Avenue dollhouse while
Penguin polishes glasses in the Iceberg Lounge,
and Ivy schemes behind lush glass
which leaves Joker to rob the bank on Main
and Killer Croc to dine in the dark, rushing sewers
beneath it all.
So it doesn't matter if he wants to go,
Clayface tells himself,
because he can't.
The city is full.
No space for another villain tonight.
Karlo must stay home.
All nights in for Clayface are
nights alone with himself,
the best person he knows.
The lights are off, though they didn’t cut the electricity,
because the TV works when he taps it.
The static hisses while Clayface rolls down the hall,
a mass of flesh dirt on hardwood and carpet -
all merciless touch, no hands.
The kitchen is dust and unwiped counters
with a calendar from last year and
the sour ghost of food but the cheap case of wine
is where it belongs. Clayface always gets himself
a present after Arkham.
Someone must. There are no fans
anymore.
He juggles the wine case in the outer orbit of his body,
hoping to keep the cold glass away from the mushy gut-ribs-soul space.
It's the principle of the thing.
No one can violate Clayface anymore because there is no
mouth to fill, no
hands to twist, no
hair or heart to pull, no beginning to end; a body that retches itself
into the space around it like
a drowning toddler thrashing against pool walls is
too busy violating or always being violated to feel violation.
But Clayface loves to act. So he
pretends it bothers him.
Clayface drops the wine case in the living room,
then squashes himself into something like a man on the way to
the bedroom. (It doesn't hurt anymore).
If he looks down, he can see the trail
worn into the carpet between here and there.
Obviously, Clayface thinks, he has his priorities figured out.
He pities the beasts who need other people to rage against
or hold
to know they're worth all the space
life imprisons them in.
What idiots.
The stained silk robe doesn't fit Karlo like it used to,
because it remembers a bridge of shoulders
plus scaffolding of
hips and entrails, but this
facsimile
of a form tricks it into laying right, more or less.
None of his old luxuries fit like they used to. The fact his makeshift hands
stain whatever is under them
doesn't help.
Clayface doubles back, grabs a wine bottle, then
peruses all the framed movie posters alongside
signed set photos
in the hallway. It's the only wall of glass Clayface doesn't mind.
Most of the photos are from the shooting of Dread Castle.
The good one.
Clayface intends to rewatch it. He always does. He needs an appetite first
that's all.
The film crew's faces are smiling and
faded and
grotesque next to his old one; Clayface can't look Basil Karlo in the face
since he's a tenacious bastard that never blinks, or shows
signs of weakness, but
judging the crew comes easy.
The best picture of Karlo has two other people in it.
Skinny, morbid Brenda got married a while back, Clayface knows,
to some other cameraman,
while Yvan - if that's him in the background handling props -
might've killed himself.
Who knows what happened to everyone else. No one has said 'hi' in years.
They're cowards, Clayface thinks. They're scared of me.
Blood onscreen was fine
until it spilled over.
By this point, he's half a bottle in,
and ready to watch movies.
Clayface stumbles back to the living room on mud blood feet.
With a face smeared on, he drops onto the discolored, broken couch
in front of his television and VCR,
blinds open,
cracked door unlocked.
It's night. The air smells like smog. Clayface doesn't bother to hide.
There are no neighbors beyond distant, screaming cats,
beyond the scared old man that sobs in Mandarin in the gutters,
because a son forgot about dementia and didn't
lock the door.
Clayface's home is a forbidden place.
The streets are always dead.
So Clayface grabs a movie from a wall full of tapes.
There are stacks of them to go through. He leans back
with a folded leg
sticking out of the robe slit.
Clayface crunches through
wine bottle necks with his teeth, spits the shards
and cork on the carpet and drinks his way through
a string of pulpy movies.
He smirks when he sees his old self. Sometimes he curses.
When the camera lingers on Basil Karlo's face
too long
Clayface grouses. He scrapes his fingers into his thigh until they're knuckle-deep -
begging to scrape against a femur -
but there's no pain, no blood,
just filth, and his leg flesh sucks his fingers away.
When he gets drunk enough, every reformed hand comes with
angry tears.
The open window doesn't matter.
Clayface doesn't worry about it.
What’s Batman going to do if he sees him?
Arrest him
for unkindness to a stranger's body?
This isn't a crime.
Dread Castle is the best movie and the worst.
Clayface sees the edges of his face, Karlo's face, in
every grainy shot
every green-lit twist of the castle hallways thats shows off
the sweep of his spine and his expressions as
he runs and shouts and kills,
but neither of those things feel like his. It's not there when he touches his
void
of a face or form. Clayface is nothing but dripping tar pretending to be
a man. He connects
to the faces of subpar actors that surround
Basil Karlo
as much as he connects to Karlo.
Clayface laughs at them. He sneers, too.
(You're better than the rest of them
even if you hate yourself ).
He looks very good in Dread Castle.
Especially his hair and arms.
Clayface feels pained numb nothing when he tries to connect the dots,
to smash visages and souls together,
but he hasn't lost his sense of judgement.
The fact they tried to hire that cheap imitation of me for the remake,
Clayface thinks, is ridiculous. If that replacement hadn’t lost his life
they would have lost their audience. They did anyway,
thanks to me.
He wasn't a bad man, but he was
an atrocious actor.
Clayface knows why he looks good in Dread Castle besides
all the rehearsals.
Someone once told Karlo
that eating spoiled the star's frame
bloated the cheekbones
swallowed the face
dulled the expressions.
So he spewed lunches into porcelain bowls between scenes, out of love for himself,
to try and improve the perfect.
He stopped when an extra counted the lines beneath his eyes
heard the strain in his voice
and asked if he was tired.
Then Karlo scarfed apples and caffeine pills til he puked
due to an overfull stomach before
heading to voice practice.
He became more careful about that sort of trick.
Mediocre line delivery,
even for a cheap movie,
was worse
than looking bad.
Why was anyone surprised
that he killed someone? More than one someone?
He started more handsome and more talented than the rest of that crew,
yet devoted to bettering himself,
to wringing his body and voice until they
screamed
under the weight of all the improvements. He fought tooth and nail to be
B-class and left bloody furrows on the scripts from late-night
binging and purging and practicing and screaming and adoring self hatred
to make himself the best at something,
because he had to be the best at something.
Reality had to mirror his reality,
or none of it mattered: it was just steam on the windows
the way his family and friends
and good days were.
Then one day Basil Karlo went home
when the cameras were off
to learn that was it:
someone else
was equal. Better.
None of those nights really mattered
at all
if he looked at it right.
He was replaceable
like any other
reel of
subpar
film.
In the present, Clayface remembers why
he thought being on the advising staff instead of starring was the end
of the world.
Now it doesn't matter. No one will cast him in
anything again. Acting propels him through Gotham's streets.
It does little more.
Nowadays, to be comfortable in a figure is to act. The faces
and limbs all come off eventually, like
make-up melting off under
set-lights and a spigot.
My body was supposed to be a gift that lasted a lifetime,
Clayface thinks. No matter how it changed. But
many gifts like that
don't last.
Karlo knows that now. Admiring his past self is
nothing but vanity.
He puts in another tape anyway.
There's no point in fighting Batman tonight. The Dark Knight has options. This is
Karlo's only role. Exhaust it, and there's nothing left.
It can wait for
a while.
So Clayface stays in
drunk
watching movies about a man
he doesn't know anymore.