The silence metastasized. A minute stretched, then another, the air in the casting room congealing around Marcus as if even oxygen was holding its breath.
He remained planted at the center of the taped X, the wet salt of his own tears drying on his cheekbones. The performance had passed through him and left residue: his muscles taut, his breathing mechanical, the smile on his lips not entirely his own.
He could feel the eyes of the room on him—first with fascination, then a hint of naked fear, as if he might at any moment leap from the stage and begin the real violence.
Nolan was the first to move. He shifted in his chair, elbows still welded to the conference table, hands steepled before his lips. His gaze did not falter, not even to glance at the notepad in front of him, which was blank except for a deep crease where he'd pressed the pen so hard it had torn the first page.
After a long moment, Nolan unspooled his hands, flattened them against the polished surface, and leaned forward.
"Sit, please," he said, the words smooth but newly oxygenated, as if this was the first breath he'd taken in an hour.
There was a chair—a cheap, institutional folding thing, offered in ritual deference to the actor. Marcus regarded it for a full three seconds, the request drifting past him like a suggestion in a language he barely understood.
He did not move.
Nolan nodded, almost imperceptibly, as if he'd expected as much. A flick of the eyes, then his gaze returned, hungrier than before.
At the far edge of the table, the woman with the iPad pressed her lips together so tight that her mouth seemed to vanish entirely. Her hand hovered over her stylus, then clenched it so hard the knuckles shone like bone. She didn't look at Marcus.
She looked at Nolan, then at the glass of water by her elbow, then at her own feet, as if afraid the floor might be the next thing to collapse.
The camera operator—who had, until now, been braced behind his lens like a trench soldier—slowly lowered the camera.
His hand trembled as he killed the recording, and for a second, the room seemed to tilt around his inability to hold steady. The after-image of Marcus's smile burned in the viewfinder, even after the feed went black.
The air reeked of sweat, ozone, and something else—something sickly sweet, like burnt sugar and rot.
The assistant at the door, the same one who'd called him in, rose shakily to her feet. She had gone gray beneath her makeup, and her left hand was pressed to her stomach in a way that suggested she was holding herself together by force of will.
She made it three steps down the hall before she bent double and vomited into the trash bin. The sound echoed back into the room, a punctuation mark that made the next moment seem more real than any that had come before.
Marcus did not blink. He kept his eyes on Nolan, letting the silence reassert itself.
"Jesus Christ," whispered the camera operator, but no one reprimanded him. He turned to the woman, voice hoarse, "I've been filming auditions for a decade. I've never seen—" The words withered and died.
Nolan tapped the table, once, twice, breaking the spell.
He pulled a folder from beneath the tabletop—white, glossy, marked with the studio's logo and the words "Principal Contract." He flipped it open, flicked a pen from the stack, and signed his name in an elegant, unbroken line.
He did not ask for a callback, did not request a second read.
He pushed the folder across the table with a gentle, practiced motion.
"Congratulations, Marcus," he said, and his eyes were the only thing that betrayed him: wide, feverish, and almost desperate.
"You are The Joker."
A ripple passed through Marcus's body—not quite a shiver, but the memory of one. He waited another heartbeat, then advanced toward the table in a slow, frictionless arc.
Each footstep sounded louder than it should have, as if the room had been built to amplify the approach.
He paused at the edge of the table, stared down at the contract. The reflection on the lacquered wood was so sharp he could see the veins in his own eyelids, the blue-green webbing at his temples.
For a moment, the face in the table wasn't his—cheekbones sculpted to razor, the smile too long, the eyes burning with a light that belonged in a different kind of body.
He watched the reflection, half-expecting it to move before he did.
With a single, precise motion, Marcus took the pen and signed. The name—Marcus Vale—spilled out in a script that was both alien and heartbreakingly familiar.
He put the pen down, careful not to let his hand shake.
Nolan let out a long, slow breath, then turned to the woman. She nodded, as if waking from a trance, and started typing furiously on her iPad, sending the first wave of messages into the world beyond this room.
The camera operator just stared, his mouth working on words that wouldn't come.
From the hallway, the assistant returned, eyes rimmed red, but her composure reassembled with the quickness of someone who knew how to patch themselves together in a crisis.
She leaned against the doorframe, hands at her sides, refusing to look directly at Marcus but tracking him in her periphery like a dangerous animal.
Nolan closed the contract folder and tucked it under his arm.
"We'll be in touch soon. You should expect a call from production before the end of the day."
He glanced back up, the intensity of his focus undiminished.
"If you need anything—support, debrief, whatever—let us know. This… this is a big thing, Marcus. For everyone."
Marcus nodded, once, the movement barely more than a twitch.
Nolan stood, extended a hand. The gesture was pure ritual, a reassertion of reality after the unreality of what had just happened.
Marcus took it. Nolan's grip was dry, but the skin over his knuckles was bloodless, as if all circulation had fled the extremities to keep the brain alive.
They held the handshake just a fraction too long, then released.
"Welcome aboard," Nolan said, softer now, the words meant for Marcus alone.
Marcus turned to go. As he did, he caught the woman with the iPad watching him—her face unreadable, eyes hollowed out and rimmed in white. He offered her the barest inclination of his head, the closest thing to a courtesy he could muster.
The camera operator stared as if he'd just seen someone drown and come back up smiling.
Marcus left the room, the click of the door latch a gunshot in the corridor. He did not look back.
He walked down the hallway, his shadow trailing behind, and for a brief instant he saw it—split and doubled, flickering along the wall. In one version, it was a man, tall and elegant, striding forward with purpose.
In the other, a slouching figure, head cocked at a question mark angle, smile stitched ear to ear.
He kept walking, letting the afterimage fade.
In the now-empty casting room, Nolan sat back down, staring at the place where Marcus had stood. His fingers traced the edge of the contract, over and over, as if by repetition he could make sense of what he had just witnessed.
In the polished surface of the table, the reflection of Marcus Vale lingered a moment longer, grinning.
....
The city was colder than he remembered, though he could not remember anything before the waiting room.
Marcus stepped out of the building and into the alley behind it, the door clapping shut behind him with a steel echo that lingered over the sound of distant traffic.
The world here was narrow: wet bricks, trash bins, the tang of ammonia and mold. Rain had fallen earlier, and the pavement shone slick under the sick light of neon signs.
From this angle, even the sky seemed locked out, reduced to a slice of black overhead.
He walked, but the walk felt wrong. It was too smooth, too measured—a parody of human locomotion. Each step sent a signal up his leg and into his spine, the message getting warped in transit.
He tried to shake out his arms, but they only swung looser, wrists gone boneless as marionette string. He pressed a hand to his chest, counting the heartbeats, but even that rhythm seemed off: slow, slow, then a triple-time flutter, as if his body was trying to reset itself by force.
He reached the end of the alley and braced himself against the wall. The brick was rough, scraped the skin of his palm, and for a moment, the pain made him believe he was still real.
He turned his head up to the neon, let the red and green burn into his retinas, hoping it would bleach away the afterimage of what had just happened.
It did not.
His hands shook. He held them out in front of him, fingers spread. They looked longer than they should have, the skin so pale it was almost blue.
He flexed them, expecting to feel resistance, but instead his index finger twitched, curling and uncurling in a memory of holding something sharp—a knife, a blade, a line of white paper.
He clenched his fists, forced the phantom motion away, but it only rebounded, landing somewhere deeper in the muscle.
He realized, with a sudden horror, that he had been smiling the whole time.
The smile was not performative. It was anatomical, fused to his face like a surgical staple. The muscles around his mouth were so tight it hurt, the corners pulling at the flesh of his cheeks until they dimpled.
His lips ached, dry and cracked, and his teeth throbbed with a pressure that suggested he had been grinding them for hours.
He ran a thumb over his bottom lip, trying to massage it loose, but the skin snapped back into place as soon as he let go. He caught a reflection of himself in the oily surface of a puddle and nearly recoiled from it.
The face looking back was not his.
The jaw was sharpened, the hollows under the cheekbones caved in. The eyes—impossibly green, almost phosphorescent in the city light—were ringed in red, the whites shot through with burst vessels.
The mouth was a wound, held together by tension and a kind of unspoken dare.
He crouched, putting his face closer to the water, and watched as the surface trembled from the effort of his own breath.
The reflection grinned.
He reached out, not trusting the evidence, and pressed his fingers to his cheeks. The bone was right, but the mapping was wrong: too high, too angular, as if someone had stretched the skin over a new scaffolding and dared him to fit in.
He dragged the hand up to his temple, then down over the jaw, feeling the micro-stubble rasp against his palm. His nails dug into the flesh, and the pain was so sharp he almost laughed.
He looked down at the hands again. They were covered in a fine tremor, the fingers incapable of total stillness.
He remembered the performance—the way the Joker had occupied him, made a home behind his eyes, rerouted every reflex. But now, stripped of the stage, there was only the aftermath: a chemical residue that would not wash away, a laugh that wanted to crawl out of his throat and take the rest of him with it.
He wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn't come. Instead, the laugh surfaced—a low, involuntary huff that shook his shoulders and left him more hollow than before. It was not a performance.
It was a symptom.
He stood up, legs weak, and leaned back against the wall, letting the rainwater seep through his shirt. The cold was a gift: it reminded him that he was still a container, even if what he contained was leaking out.
He looked at the puddle one last time. The face there was already fading, eaten up by ripples and city grime.
"Was that me... or him?" he asked, voice small and sanded raw by use.
The question hovered in the air, then broke apart.
He wiped the last of the smile from his mouth, but it fought to return, a reflex bred into the bone.
He turned his back on the reflection and walked into the street, the sound of his own laughter trailing after him, thin and hungry.
He wondered, with a terror he dared not name, whether he would ever stop smiling again.
.........
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