by Paul Dini
Harleen smiled. Ever since the Killer Croc incident, Dr. Leland had been her new best friend. Yesterday the woman had taken her through the ward housing the least dangerous patients, those thought to have some chance of leaving Arkham. Harleen was far more interested in meeting patients closer to the Killer Croc end of the spectrum. But she was the new kid; she had to be patient.
* * *
Three weeks later, Harleen was running out of patience.
Dr. Leland still hadn’t taken her down to Arkham’s lowest levels, where the most difficult and dangerous inmates were kept. One of the other psychiatrists, a balding forty-ish man named Reginald Percival (Harley knew he wasn’t from Brooklyn—he’d never have survived his childhood with that name), referred to those wards as storage. Dr. Percival kept his head down, did what was required to get through the day, then went home and drank.
Drinking was the most common coping strategy for Arkham Asylum staff overall. It wasn’t a great solution, Dr. Leland said, but it was legal without a prescription.
Harleen thought the hardest thing about the job wasn’t how dangerous the inmates were or that most of them would never be well enough to leave. It was the fact that, unlike other hospitals where she had interned or been resident at, Arkham had no overall rhythm.
There was routine—meals, medication, therapy, recreation, bedtime—but each ward had its own; nothing connected all the different areas of Arkham into a unified whole. The most dangerous patients might as well have been in another hospital. It certainly seemed that way from what Harleen read in their files. They all lived in worlds of their own without much in common save the fact that they’d never leave.
Arkham had no set visiting hours—anyone wishing to see a patient had to make an appointment twenty-four hours in advance. “Nobody at Arkham has regular visitors,” Dr. Leland told her over a late lunch in her office. “Their friends and family feel they’ve all suffered enough.”
Harleen nodded knowingly. “As my abnormal psych prof used to say, people with antisocial personality disorder don’t suffer from it—everyone around them does.”
“Good one,” Dr. Leland said with a short, humorless laugh.
“Still, there seem to be a fair number of visitors,” Harleen went on. “Mostly at night.”
“Sometimes doctors bring in specialists for consultation,” Dr. Leland said. “Others are scientists doing research on certain kinds of pathology and their effects on the brain.” She spoke in a brisk way and Harleen knew she wanted to change the subject. “Whenever possible, they make their findings available to us.” She nodded at the black filing cabinet against the nearest wall. “You can find them in the third drawer down. The folders are toward the back, in the section marked ‘New Data.’”
“Why wouldn’t they make their findings available to us?” Harleen asked, honestly curious.
“If they’re working on a new drug or trying to improve an existing medication,” Dr. Leland said, “information about work-product is confidential.”
“Even when they’re beta-testing on our patients?” Harleen asked.
“No one beta-tests anything on our patients,” Dr. Leland said sharply. “Our patients are either too atypical or too unstable.”
Harleen’s impatience spurred her on. “What about clinical trials?”
“The last clinical trial we ever participated in was thirty years ago, before my time. There’s a report on it in the bottom drawer of the same filing cabinet. It’s not pleasant reading.” Dr. Leland put down her fork and pushed her salad to one side. “Is there something on your mind you want to discuss?”
I was just wondering about some of those “scientists” who come in around midnight with great big cases on wheels, Harleen thought. What’s in them? What are they doing to the patients, which patients are they doing it to, and who said it was okay?
“I’m just curious,” Harleen said. “Especially if they’re patients I’ll be treating.”
“Arkham Asylum is where criminals bottom out,” Dr. Leland said. “The people who end up here are truly lost souls. The whole world has washed its hands of them. Even those patients who have a genuine chance at rehabilitation and release. That’s a chance, not a sure thing.
“But even if they actually make it, even if we send them out of the gates to catch the bus to Gotham with new clothes, a shine on their shoes, and a certificate declaring them legally sane, it wouldn’t change the fact that they’d been in Arkham. In the view of so-called respectable society, anyone bad enough to be sent here is too damaged ever to be fixed. They might look like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put them together again, but it’s only a matter of time before they blow up real good. Then it’s back to Arkham where they belong, post-haste, tout suite, and good riddance.”
“Does that happen a lot?” Harleen asked.
“Not as much as it used to,” Dr. Leland said. “But only because we don’t discharge most patients anymore. When we do, we send them to a halfway house in Gotham City. Which I personally think is the exact wrong thing to do, but I don’t have any say in the matter.”
Harleen frowned. “You think it’s wrong to send them to a halfway house?”
“No,” said Dr. Leland, “I think it’s wrong to send them to Gotham City. There’s something about Gotham that’s no good for them.”
* * *
Harleen threw herself into her work, while trying to figure out if there was anything she could do to make Arkham less disjointed. The problem may simply have been that Arkham was so understaffed.
In Harleen’s opinion, there should have been at least ten full-time shrinks, and a dozen would have been better. But the board of directors held the purse strings, Dr. Leland told her, and the board said they couldn’t afford more staff.
The board must have been made up of rich people, Harleen thought. Only rich people were so stingy. And they wondered why people wanted to rob them. She’d have bet good money that if every board member threw in what they spent on a week of fancy dinners, they could probably have built a whole new wing with an indoor swimming pool.
Well, okay, maybe the pool would have to wait till the next fiscal year.
* * *
After a while, Harleen realized she was starting to drift. Worrying over all of the problems here kept her from focusing properly. She was getting to be like Dr. Percival—just doing whatever she had to do for the day, then going home, except she wasn’t drinking herself into a stupor. The upside of her scrimping through college and med school on scholarship and loans was that she’d never been able to afford to go out drinking—or even stay in with a six-pack—so she’d never got into the habit of drowning her sorrows. If she kept on like this, however, she’d probably start. The last thing she needed was a drinking problem.
Harleen went back and reread a lot of patient files, with the idea of constructing a three-dimensional picture of Arkham. This time, however, she paid more attention to the patients designated as unusually high risks to themselves and everyone around them. They comprised a relatively small number of patients, and yet a great deal of Arkham’s resources were committed just to keeping them contained. Even so, some of them managed to break out. The Joker in particular was especially skilled at engineering escapes, although for the life of her, she couldn’t see how. They kept him in solitary in the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement with at least one orderly stationed outside, and more if he seemed to be getting hyperactive.
According to his file, the Joker had absolutely no regard for anyone’s safety, including his own; he risked his life in terrifying ways, jumping out windows or off rooftops to what should have been sure death and survived by crazy-dumb luck, finding something to land on or, in one case, actually having his clothes catch on a second-story gargoyle before he could hit the street.
Of course, being a daredevil and a thrill-seeker went along with being a psychopath; as impressive as his split-second survival might be, other people didn’t survive. Humor with a body count, Harleen
reminded herself. Even so, she couldn’t help being impressed. If only he could turn his energy toward something constructive and worthwhile, instead of acting out just for attention.
That was what it was—attention-seeking; Harleen was sure of it. He was like a great big kid yelling Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!
Well, a great big kid with a body count.
But if you overlooked the homicides, you were left with a great big spoiled five-year-old in clown white—which, she remembered, didn’t come off. She couldn’t recall what had happened, just that he blamed Batman for it. But that was no distinction—he blamed Batman for everything.
Still, if she’d been stuck with a face like that, Harleen thought, maybe she’d have taken it out not just on Batman but the rest of the world, too.
In any case, this was a mind she really wanted to delve into. Harleen let herself fantasize for a minute or two before reluctantly setting the idea aside. Dr. Leland would never go for it; she’d say Harleen was too new and it was too risky.
* * *
All things considered, Dr. Leland was doing the best she could with too little funding from an uncaring board, Harleen thought, but if she disappeared tomorrow (like some of the consulting doctors), she wouldn’t leave much of a legacy. None of the doctors would. That wasn’t how Harleen wanted her own career to go. She’d never settled for “good enough” and she wasn’t going to start now. So how could she do more?
Harleen reviewed the notes she’d made and it suddenly hit her: In all the time Arkham Asylum had been protecting polite society from the forces of chaos and evil, very little consideration had ever been given to the special problems of being criminally insane and female.
Time to make a difference, Harleen thought, and began work on a project she hoped would impress Dr. Leland.
* * *
Harleen sweated over writing up her project, trying to get every detail exactly right. This wasn’t like writing a dissertation or a research proposal; she wasn’t even sure what Dr. Leland would expect to see. All she could do was make it clear that she wanted to help these women if it was at all possible.
But would the decision be up to Dr. Leland, Harleen wondered, or would she have to show it to the board of directors—whoever they were—and get their approval? If they were anything like academic committees, they might keep sending it back with requested changes, and—oh God help her—that could go on for months. The possibility of a long delay made her seriously consider scrapping the whole thing rather than deal with bureaucracy. Bureaucracy was like kudzu—it took over and choked the life out of everything. But opting to do nothing just because of that was hardly productive.
When she finally delivered the proposal, however, Dr. Leland told her to wait while she skimmed the ten pages—Harleen had also put together a PowerPoint version, just in case—then dropped it on her desk and told her to go ahead. “The only thing I insist on is that there be an armed guard in the room and another right outside the door.”
This was a win; common sense told Harleen to take it and run, but she couldn’t help herself. “Really?” she said. “I thought this would be harder.”
Dr. Leland smiled. “As long as it doesn’t require special shoes, human sacrifice, or extra funding, you can do almost anything, as long as you let me know about it. I must say, I quite liked getting a formal written proposal.”
I had no idea it was this bad. Harleen barely managed not to say it aloud.
“If there’s nothing else you need,” Dr. Leland went on, “you can go ahead and convene your first meeting of the Female Inmates Support Group, or whatever you want to call it.”
“Thank you, Dr. Leland,” Harleen said with a mix of confidence and apprehension. “I won’t let you down. Should I come by and tell you how it went?”
Dr. Leland dipped her head noncommittally. “Or if you need a good cry.”
Harleen laughed, then realized Dr. Leland hadn’t been making a joke.
Two days later, Harleen looked at the women seated in a small semicircle in front of her and wondered, What have I done?
Well, she had asked Dr. Leland for Arkham Asylum’s most egregious female patients and Dr. Leland had obliged. Not that there had been a large pool to choose from—the criminal justice system sent fewer women to Arkham. The files for these women described their behavior as bizarre, grotesque, and seemingly irrational, with the emphasis on seemingly. It varied; sometimes it was supposedly or appears to be, depending perhaps on how bad the evaluating physician’s day had been.
This was usually followed by a warning that the patient, though irrational, was capable of acting with purpose and intent. Staff were advised to be on their guard at all times and cautioned against being alone with them, even while restrained.
Dr. Leland had come by Harleen’s office a few hours earlier to tell her to stay safe. “Don’t let the armed guard leave you alone in the room with them, don’t turn your back on them, and for God’s sake, don’t let any of them touch you.”
“Their touch is dangerous?” Harleen had said, incredulous.
“Or at the very least disgusting.” Dr. Leland looked worried. “The female of the species is far more dangerous than the male. All species. That’s not a double standard, Dr. Quinzel, it’s a fact.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Harleen told her. “As it happens, I’m a female of the species, myself.”
“More power to you, and Godspeed,” Dr. Leland replied and left. Harleen began to wonder if Arkham’s female patients couldn’t get proper treatment because their problems had been blown completely out of proportion.
Now she was also wondering if she was in over her head.
All the women had arrived in full restraints accompanied by two orderlies, who proceeded to chain them to the heavy wooden chairs in the room. One of the orderlies saw the dismayed look on Harleen’s face and told her Dr. Leland had insisted the women be restrained throughout the session; he had mistaken Harleen’s growing anxiety for compassion. Unfortunately, patients weren’t as easily fooled. She tried to project an air of professional concern, detached but not cold, open but untouchable.
The woman in the chair to the left was going to be her toughest customer. Pamela Isley, who preferred to be called Poison Ivy, was the patient who looked after the tree outside Harley’s window. Or rather, she had been; her gardening privileges had been curtailed after she’d made the leaves toxic. She was still allowed time in the greenhouse where she was supposedly working on a way to reverse this. So far, she hadn’t had any success, although she had managed to reduce the toxicity so the leaves no longer ruined the paint job of any cars they fell on.
She was also permitted to have a small number of potted plants in her room, although “permitted” wasn’t quite the right word. Things just grew around Pamela Isley, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Arkham’s board of directors in concert with Dr. Leland came to a compromise with her: they would “let” her maintain a small indoor garden, and she would keep it small and non-toxic. It was better than having to send in a hazmat team twice a week to rip out rogue vegetation, or suffer with a local pollen count of ten thousand even when it wasn’t hay-fever season.
Harleen wondered how Arkham managed to keep her confined. Either Pamela Isley wasn’t as powerful as she wanted everyone to believe, or she was just biding her time while she waited for… well, whatever.
Or maybe Pamela Isley was just crazy.
She was a beautiful woman. But what would have turned heads on the street more than her good looks were the vines snaking through her gorgeous red hair. On anyone else, it would have seemed like a cheap, silly affectation—Hey, world, check me out. I’m so crazy! But on Pamela Isley/Poison Ivy, they looked—well—not normal, but not out of place. Natural, even.
The way she cooed and whispered to them, however, wasn’t natural, and the way the vines seemed to move in response to her was downright unsettling. Harleen decided she would always address her as Pamela or Ms. Isley. Ope
nly refusing to participate in Isley’s delusion would be a much-needed reality check, even if only for the duration of the session. The patient needed to know she wasn’t the only tough customer in the house.
At that moment, Isley was making a big show of ignoring Harleen, turning away from her as much as her chains would allow, which wasn’t a lot. That was actually a good sign; the more effort it took for Isley to snub her, the more important she considered Harleen to be. It wouldn’t be easy getting through Isley’s jungle of defenses to reach the real her, but Harleen had hope. Which was more than she could say for the other three women.
The woman to Isley’s left was Harriet Pratt. Like Isley, she had a nom de guerre—March Harriet—but that was all they had in common. Isley was independent, single, and proud of it. Pratt had willingly latched onto the Mad Hatter, a foul and caustic character that even other criminals couldn’t stand.
Harleen was baffled as to what the woman saw in him. There was nothing gentle about him, nothing that suggested he might be affectionate. If Alice had met him at the Mad Tea Party, Harleen thought, she’d have woken up screaming. And if Harriet Pratt had been there with him, poor Alice might never have slept again.
At the bottom of the first page in Pratt’s file, someone had scrawled Crazier than a shithouse rat!! Dr. Leland strongly discouraged profanity or terms like “crazy” as unprofessional and grounds for a disciplinary note in the employee’s record. Despite that, the notation remained untouched, although it could have been blacked out easily. Apparently what it lacked in professionalism it made up for in accuracy.
Harriet Pratt’s time in Arkham had taken a toll on her. Poor diet had dulled her complexion and thinned her blonde hair. Her clothing was loose and shapeless; Harleen wasn’t sure if she was carrying extra weight or just had poor muscle tone from inactivity. Her file put her age at thirty-five but she looked fifteen years older.
Or that might have been the effect of her scratchy speaking voice and the cringe-inducing Cockney accent she put on, calling everyone “ducks” or “ducky” or “luv.” A little bit of that went a long way, Harleen thought unhappily; somewhere in London’s East End, a Pearly Queen was having nightmares. Pratt’s accent and her exclamations of “Crikey!”, “Blimey, mate!”, and “Oo-er!” were as abrasive as the Mad Hatter’s ugly laugh.