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“So… this other part of you took over your body and stole Miss Kringle’s body to hide it in the GCPD,” said Mr. Penguin—no, Oswald, he’d said to call him Oswald—over the rim of his wineglass (or wine-beaker), sounding skeptical.
“Yes. And he left a series of riddles I had to solve to find it. First, I found one of her hands that he had hidden in the vending machine—behind the ladyfingers, naturally.” Ed giggled; he appreciated the joke now. “I had to get all of them out of the row so that I could retrieve the hand!”
Oswald’s lips twitched with faint amusement, his eyebrows still quirked skeptically upward. “Your other half has a morbid sense of humor,” he remarked.
“He does,” Ed laughed, “—or we do,” he corrected himself. On a whimsical impulse, he stood up from the dinner table and went to the little piano standing against the wall, where he began to play and sing:
“I hold your hand in mine, dear,
I press it to my lips,
I take a healthy bite from
Your dainty fingertips…”
Oswald gave a startled wheeze that may or may not have been laughter. “What on earth…?”
Ed decided to skip to the last verse and finished with a flourish:
“I’m sorry now I killed you,
For our love was something fine,
And until they come to get me
I shall hold your hand in mine!”
He turned back toward Oswald, who was now staring at him in deep perplexity and perhaps some alarm. “Did you just… make that up?”
“Ha—I wish! I take it you’re not familiar with Tom Lehrer?”
“Should I be?”
“Ah, he’s an unjustly neglected genius!”
“You don’t say,” Oswald said dryly.
“He set the names of all the chemical elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Modern Major-General’:
“There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium…”
Ed turned his head while still playing to see Oswald looking bemused.
“No, I should have guessed that wouldn’t impress you. How about this one?
“All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon
When we’re poisoning pigeons in the park…”
“What the fuck?!” he heard Oswald splutter from behind him.
“Every Sunday you’ll see my sweetheart and me
As we poison the pigeons in the park!
When they see us coming, the birdies all try an’ hide,
But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyan-hide…”
“Ed, that’s horrible!” Oswald protested, looking genuinely appalled.
Ed frowned at him. “We spent several hours carving up a man together two nights ago, but you draw the line at poisoning pigeons?”
“The pigeons didn’t do anything wrong! People think of them as pests, or vermin, but really they were domesticated animals that served humans for centuries, carrying messages over amazing distances, until we abandoned them when we didn’t need them anymore. How can we blame them for congregating in cities when we bred them to depend on us, to seek out our company?” This speech was strangely impassioned, as if Oswald truly was indignant on behalf of pigeon-kind, or even identified with them personally.
“Of course, you would have a special fondness for birds, wouldn’t you?” Ed mused.
Oswald folded his arms defensively across his chest, wincing slightly when he moved his injured shoulder too fast. “I like animals in general,” he said.
“Noted,” Ed replied. He himself had never been sentimental about animals. The fact that he was the only student in his high school biology classes who had reacted to the task of dissecting frogs and fetal pigs not with disgust or pity, but with delighted fascination, had contributed to widening the gulf between himself and his classmates into a chasm. But then, he reflected, it made a difference that they were already dead; he would take no pleasure in killing frogs, pigs, or pigeons, so he wouldn’t unless he needed them for something: a scientific inquiry, a recipe, or some other important plan.
He wasn’t ready to give up on convincing Oswald of Tom Lehrer’s genius, however. “All right, maybe you’ll like this one:
“I really have a yen
To go back once again
Back to the place where no one wears a frown,
To see once more those super-special just plain folks
In my home town.
“I remember Dan,
The druggist on the corner, ’e
Was never mean or ornery,
He was swell.
He killed his mother-in-law and ground her up real well
And sprinkled just a bit
Over each banana split…”
Oswald guffawed at this, which Ed took as encouragement to keep singing.
“The guy who taught us math
Who never took a bath
Acquired a certain measure of renown,
And after school he sold the most amazing pictures
In my home town.”
Oswald continued snickering, so Ed turned to shoot him a grin as he went on:
“That fellow was no fool
Who taught our Sunday school
And neither was our kindly Parson Brown;
We’re recording tonight, so I have to leave this line out
In my home town.”
“Wait, what?”
“That’s what he says on the record. It was made in 1953, so the implication is that they were, uh… involved.”
“Oh, is that all? Funny to think that that was considered more unspeakable than cannibalism…”
“There are some places where it still is,” Ed pointed out. Such as his own little semi-rural hometown with its sentimental sepia-tinted self-image and scurrilous open secrets, which he could just imagine writing into song:
Our car mechanic John
Is drunk by half past one
And beats his wife and son all black and blue,
But he never leaves bruises where anyone can see them,
So what can you do?
And anyway, that Ed
Is a weird and creepy kid,
We’re not sure what he did to set Dad off,
But whatever it was, that sick faggot probably deserved it,
And that’s good enough.
The song probably didn’t resonate in quite the same way for someone like Oswald who grew up in Gotham City, which of course had its own scurrilous open secrets—most notably, the way the city government was entirely in the pocket of organized crime—but which also afforded its inhabitants an anonymity, if they wanted it, that would have been unimaginable to the residents of the town where Ed grew up. That was a large part of why Ed had moved here—to pupate, one might say (extending his butterfly metaphor), in the shelter of anonymity before trading the shameful, undeserved notoriety of his early life for a notoriety he intended to earn, just as the nobody Oswald Cobblepot had earned his notoriety as the Penguin.
“I guess there are some places where it’s still 1953,” Oswald sniffed. He had already made clear his complete disdain for the world outside of Gotham; he said he’d only left the city once, not by choice, for a miserable three days, and had no desire to do so ever again (now that he had shaken off the debilitating despair that had him vowing to give up and leave Gotham forever in the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death).
“Well, yes,” Ed said shortly, then decided to redirect the conversation back to its more entertaining topic. “Tom Lehrer also did a lot of political and social satire, not just the morbid absurdism—commenting on the controversies and changing mores of his day. Like his song in praise of ‘Smut,’ or—oh, I think you might appreciate this one:
“I ache for the touch of your lips, dear,
But much more for the touch of your whips, dear:
You can raise welts
Like nobody else
As we dance to the Masochism Tango.
“Let our love be a flame, not an ember;
Say it’s me that you want to dismember.
Blacken my eye,
Set fire to my tie
As we dance to the Masochism Tango!”
Ed turned around again to see Oswald’s reaction and found that he had come to stand behind his chair at the piano, still holding his beaker of red wine, wearing an expression that seemed mostly amused. It was unusual that Ed hadn’t heard him move, because his limp made it near impossible for him to walk quietly; he must have been too absorbed in the music.
“Why did you think that song would appeal to me, in particular?” Oswald asked, his mouth tilting up in a crooked half-smile.
“Oh, uh, well—” Ed found himself stalling as he groped for an acceptable answer. “I know you have something of a sadistic streak yourself—though maybe not in, uh, such an erotic way… and you must have run across some, ah, interesting proclivities when you were working for Fish Mooney—in the, um, more colorful part of the entertainment district.”
Oswald’s smile had been gradually widening while Ed struggled through this explanation. “Fish was never directly involved with that type of entertainment business, and consequently, neither was I… but yes, it did flourish in her territory—under the umbrella, so to speak, of her supervision and protection—which means that I did hear some quite memorable things about the wide range of proclivities that could be expressed and satisfied there.”
Ed let out a held breath and cleared his throat, relieved that Oswald had chosen to accept and cooperate in his effort at saving face rather than continue to press him on the ill-founded assumption that, if examined further, might point to some embarrassing features of Ed’s mental landscape.
“Most people know that the word ‘sadism’ comes from the Marquis de Sade, but did you know that ‘masochism’ is derived from the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch? He was a nineteenth-century Austrian nobleman who wrote erotic stories and novels with characters who enjoyed being dominated and abused by powerful women.”
“No, I did not know that,” Oswald replied, with an amused tone to match his oddly smug, knowing smile. Ed had the sense that Oswald’s amusement was directed at him, but also that it wasn’t at his expense—at least, it mostly wasn’t—so he didn’t mind… mostly. There was just a little itch in his chest, a slight queasy feeling deep in his stomach, when he saw Oswald smile like that, as if he knew something about Ed that Ed didn’t want him to know, or didn’t even know himself.
Ed grinned back at him, wanting to give the impression that he was in on the joke, whatever it was. “How did we get here?” he asked with an absent-minded air. He knew perfectly well, but he wanted to test whether Oswald remembered. He usually did, but Ed liked getting these little confirmations that Oswald was actually paying attention to their conversations, really listening to Ed in a way few of his supposed ‘friends’ ever had.
“You were telling me about how your other half hid your girlfriend’s body and made you solve riddles to find it, and then it reminded you of a… rather macabre song.” Oswald still had that amused tone and a hint of a smile as he said this.
Ed’s grin broadened and his chest warmed at this reaffirmation of Oswald’s unique attunement, his receptiveness to Ed’s efforts at connection… but that warmth still didn’t quite manage to fully crowd out or soothe the nagging itch.
“Ah, yes, right.” Ed rose from the chair at the piano and went back to sit at the table, and Oswald sauntered casually after him. “So I got her hand out of the vending machine, but where was the rest of the body? There had to be another clue hidden with the hand. Once again, the ladyfingers turned out to be a hint…”
“Who puts ladyfingers in a vending machine, anyway? Are people going to be making tiramisu with the shitty break room coffee?”
“I think some people just dip them in coffee… but it is a bit odd, isn’t it? Almost like the joke was just waiting to be made!”
Oswald scoffed. “Fate again? I would think she’d have better things to do than stock vending machines in the GCPD.”
“If not Fate, then someone in maintenance must have a pretty morbid sense of humor…”