Chapter 28 begins with somebody knocking on John’s door. He refuses to answer it. Surprise, surprise, it’s Joy, who, appearing to be contrite, asks John if she can come in.
No John, don’t do it! It’s clearly a trap!
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, and taken aback by the way Joy looked. Her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed. Her face was sallow, lined as though she had aged ten years. She had scratched her cheek somehow, and there was blood smeared around it. She had done nothing to her hair since we returned to the hotel, and it was half in a bun, with strands hanging loosely down the side of her head, and a large strand swept over her forehead. She usually took great care of her appearance; she must not have looked in the mirror at all. Or now just didn’t care. (page 213)
Or she neglected to maintain herself in order to fool John into thinking that she feels guilty about the previous night, even though she’s a sociopath and so is incapable of that emotion. She even uses fake tears. (Though Rummel, of course, denies this.)
To John’s credit, he doesn’t fall for it. Instead, he can only see how Joy killed those teenagers. Joy, meanwhile, increases the guilt-trip, claiming that she loves John, and would die for John, and offers him the chance to leave her and forget about the mission.1 Flip the genders around and this scene gets a lot more disturbing, doesn’t it? Joy’s actions here are reminiscent of those of domestic abusers.
Then Joy does something unexpected. She throws down her knives and begs John to kill her. Though Rummel may think this means that Joy feels guilty, I beg to differ. Think about her upbringing. She was raised to be fanatically devoted to the cause of Tor’s groupies. If anything, I can believe that she attaches no value to human life, even her own. It is quite possible that she intends some sort of Gambit Roulette here. If John takes the bait and kills her, then she will have proved to him from beyond the grave that he doesn’t practice what he preaches, and if he doesn’t kill her, then she lives and is free to torment him some more. Her emotions are so fake here that I honestly can’t see her remorse as genuine.
As for what John does? He says that he cannot kill Joy, and that he will never leave her side.2 Yet by doing this, John has demonstrated mercy, the very same trait that Joy revealed herself incapable of showing when she killed those teenagers.3 The fact that she is in charge of a mission that will determine the course of the world is very worrying indeed, especially now that John shows no willingness to rein her in.
After they kiss and make up, Joy explains her rationale. (Well, other than having insatiable bloodlust, anyway.) Basically, there’s some religion-bashing where Joy says that in non-democratic areas of the world like Latin America and the Middle East, the rape victim is punished while the rapist gets off scot-free, thus killing rapists is actually part of their mission. Fair enough I suppose (though still see my earlier footnote), but at no point do John and Joy ever consider nonviolently campaigning for equal rights for women and minorities. Not only does this make them hypocrites, it also reinforces the idea that to Joy, Violence Is The Only Option.
Joy then continues for another paragraph about how Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil. I really think that Rummel is trying too hard to prove he’s not sexist. Unfortunately for him, it is difficult for me to believe that in light of all the other scenes where he objectifies women. There is more to sexism than just thinking that rape is okay, and likewise there is far more to opposing sexism than just being against rape. That’s just basic decency. I am not going to praise him for basic decency, as that is the default. I hereby award no heroism points.
As an aside, Joy says that if the teenagers had gotten away with raping her, that they may have killed her and John too, both to eliminate witnesses4 and because John is a hated American. At no point does the book ever explain why some Mexicans hate Americans; the way it tells it, all Mexicans hate all Americans for no reason at all. Of course, explaining the real reason would disprove Rummel’s claim that the United States has a perfectly clean history.5
And with John and Joy taking a bath together, the chapter ends. I told you that John wouldn’t permanently break up with her.
This chapter was short and I probably should have sporked it together with the previous one. However, since the next chapter starts with another newspaper clipping, I want to stop here for now.
Footnotes
1 By the way, if he had accepted that offer, I am sure that John would have wound up on Joy’s list of people to kill, because he knows too much.
2 So we must endure more of Jerk Sue extraordinaire, unfortunately.
3 Now, if she had shown mercy to the teenagers, and they continued to try to assault her after this, and then she had killed them, I would have significantly less of a problem with it, because then they would have brought it entirely on themselves. But if Joy is supposed to be seen as good, then murder should not be her first resort.
4 Really, it takes a special level of stupidity to attempt to commit a violent crime in the presence of witnesses. Rummel couldn’t have forgotten John was there because he narrated it.
5 Bearing in mind that the US wasn’t really democratic at the time of the Mexican-American War because slavery was still legal, so this doesn’t actually go against the democratic peace theory, it’s quite unusual that although Rummel lambastes other countries for the atrocities of their non-democratic predecessors, he treats slavery in the United States as no more than a footnote, considering the US to be a democracy from its inception.
Mingnon on 21 February 2013, 22:54 said:
So John can’t win if he really does not wish to kill people.
Oh yeah, and about my earlier suggestion to send the would-of-been rapist brats to jail: Was Joy even thinking that the police would have simply let them go and had her punished, instead?
Oh wait, of course she wasn’t. Perhaps she wasn’t even thinking to send anyone to jail at all. She’s like the polar opposite of Batman.
swenson on 22 February 2013, 11:49 said:
Hahaha, she really is! He’s all “no guns, violence only to stop crimes and protect the innocent, lots of money for social programs, always give people second chances, etc. etc.” She’s “ALL THE GUNS, VIOLENCE ALL THE TIME FOR NO REASON, SOCIAL PROGRAMS THOSE SOUND LIBERAL AND THEREFORE EVIL TO ME, and NO SECOND CHANCES EVER.”
Anyway, I’m with you with not believing Joy’s emotions here. We see absolutely no character development from her at all up to this point. I can see something where she’s starting to break out from her programming, basically, going, wait a minute, maybe John’s right, maybe there’s another option, but she clearly isn’t thinking along those lines here. She’s not upset because she had to kill people and thought better of it later. She’s upset because John is mad at her. She truly is a little sociopath. Even Eragon had pangs of regret here and there.
Tim on 22 February 2013, 12:46 said:
Why did she even bring those, was she going to go “See? These are my apologising knives. Don’t make me get out my angry knives.”
Tim on 22 February 2013, 20:11 said:
Also this book is reminding me of that hilarious bit in Dead to Rights: Retribution where Jack Slate is trying to BE A GOOD COP LIKE HIS FATHER AND ARREST PEOPLE and does this by shooting his way into a police station and putting a guy in a cell.
lilyWhite on 23 February 2013, 01:27 said:
Jack Slate, on the bad guys: “They were judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one.”
Cue Jack brutally killing every single person who gets in his way.
(Also worth mentioning is how Jack happily uses that guy he arrests as a human shield and smashes his face into buttons on the wall. I love Retribution.)
Tim on 23 February 2013, 20:30 said:
I liked the SA thread’s guess that Shadow interprets the command “KEYS” as “Kill Everything You See.”
lilyWhite on 23 February 2013, 21:04 said:
…you mean there was actually a point to the Shadow sections other than brutally killing everything in your path? News to me. XD