by Paul Dini
Without another word, she turned on her heel and rapped sharply on the door of his cell to let the guard know she was ready to leave. The Joker smiled after her as she left. Without a word. Because she didn’t know what to say.
Gotcha.
* * *
Harleen maintained her dignified bearing all the way back to her office, not letting herself relax even a little until she closed the door behind her. Slumped at her desk, she called the nurse on D ward to say she was running behind and she’d see Mr. O’Brien an hour later. Deuce O’Brien wouldn’t mind, if he even noticed. Unlike the Joker, who was obviously starved for company.
It wasn’t that Harleen wanted to give up on O’Brien, or any other patient; she simply wasn’t sure she could do anything more for him. The world was full of people who were content to be mediocre. Why would the criminally insane be any different? Still, she’d have thought anyone who bothered to transgress wouldn’t settle for being an underachiever.
The Joker, on the other hand, had actually challenged her to make a difference in his life. And if there was anything Harleen Quinzel really relished, it was a challenge.
No, no—what was she thinking?
Too late. She couldn’t un-think it.
* * *
Just being in the Joker’s cell had given her all kinds of ideas and, despite her best efforts to turn them away, they chased her for days, refusing to leave her alone. The man was an exhibitionist, an extrovert turned up to eleven. The worst thing anyone could do to a man like that was bury him alive in a sub-sub-sub-sub-basement and restrict his social contact to near-zero. That wasn’t therapy, it was torture. It would only serve to make him obsessed with breaking out. The obsession would keep building up until the pressure became so great, he had to escape or his head would explode. And of course once he had, his compulsion to act out inappropriately would take over. Humor with a body count.
Eventually he would be recaptured—by Batman, according to his file—and returned to Arkham where the cycle would start over again. Stifling confinement, pressure build-up, break-out, high crimes and misdemeanors, re-apprehension, back to Arkham. Good God, why did no one see the man was trapped in a vicious cycle courtesy of the criminal justice system?
Or, to be more precise, the criminal justice system as personified by Batman. Who was not, in fact, legally part of the justice system. How unconscionable was that? So what if Batman was supposed to be on the side of the angels, one of the good guys—how was a masked vigilante a good guy?
There was no answer to that because it was the question nobody wanted to ask. It didn’t fit the Batman-as-hero myth everyone in Gotham had embraced. Anyone who didn’t toe that line was a bad guy and ended up in jail. Or in Arkham.
That was it in a nutshell: if you dissented, if you didn’t buy into Batman, you were a criminal or crazy. Or both.
If resistance to Batman was a crime, then crime was a revolutionary act.
It was this insight that made Harleen certain she could help the Joker step off the terrible treadmill the justice system had condemned him to. She could help him find a better way to express himself, a way that wouldn’t give Batman an opportunity to drop him back into the black hole of Arkham Asylum.
* * *
Dr. Leland looked up from Harleen’s new proposal, her expression troubled. “I’m really not comfortable with the suggestion that Arkham Asylum is a blind alley with no exit.”
“That wasn’t what I said.” Harleen tried not to be defensive. She had spent almost three weeks rewriting the proposal to make it sound more objective and less emotional. But when you were passionate about something, it was damned near impossible to come across as coolly reserved. After the group session fiasco, she knew Dr. Leland would look very carefully at anything else she proposed, so she had to make her boss see her as calm and professional, not enthusiastic and eager. “I simply pointed out that many patients at Arkham will never leave.”
“And that’s because they’ll always pose a threat to everyone around them,” Dr. Leland said. “Not because Arkham Asylum is a dead end.”
“Yes, I know, I agree,” Harleen said, hoping she didn’t sound as impatient as she felt. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try just as hard to help them as we do patients who can someday be discharged. No, they won’t get well, but we could try to help them be less ill, to find a way to express their feelings—”
“Most of them feel homicidal,” Dr. Leland said, sitting back in her chair. “And expressing themselves is what put them in here.”
“Really,” said Harleen, unable to help herself. “A lot of the files say it was Batman.”
Dr. Leland gave her a look. “Batman captured them, often in flagrante delicto. Their being diagnosed as criminally insane put them in here.”
“But can we really be sure about that?” Harleen said. “Nobody knows who Batman really is. He could be the doctor who signs the commitment papers or a higher-up in the police department. For all anyone knows, he could even be the judge who sentenced them.”
“Gotham City isn’t like anywhere else,” Dr. Leland said with a faint, sad smile. “People who come here from other, more conventional cities find it hard to understand our brand of normal.”
“Someday I’d like to get Batman in for therapy,” Harleen said.
Dr. Leland gave a single short laugh.
“Oh, I know no one ever will,” Harleen added. “He can’t risk being unmasked.” She sat forward in her chair. “But just suppose you were in private practice in Gotham and you discovered one of your patients was a masked vigilante. What would you think—‘My, isn’t he well-adjusted, I wonder if he’s single?’”
Dr. Leland laughed. “Only if he were Batman.”
“You’re missing the point,” Harleen said, exasperated.
“No more so than you, Dr. Quinzel,” Dr. Leland said. “Because—as I’m sure you’re tired of hearing—you’re not from around here.”
Harleen bristled. “So you’re saying I don’t get it because I don’t get it. Fine, I don’t get it. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about there being room for improvement in how we do things here.” She nodded at the folder on the desk. “That proposal is one idea on how to make a start.”
Dr. Leland’s smile was flat. “Your becoming the Joker’s therapist will fix everything that’s wrong with Arkham Asylum? Oh, relax, I know that’s not what you mean,” she added as Harleen started to protest. “But some of your proposal reads very close to that kind of oversimplification.”
“It’s just that I feel it’s a tremendous waste to bury such an active intellect in a rock-bottom sub-basement. Someone so energetic will be better served by treatment that will address his issues by working with him as he is, instead of trying to make him into something he isn’t. I know my last idea didn’t work out very well—it was a mistake to take on a whole group. My real strength is in one-on-one. Just me and the J—the patient.”
“We don’t have enough doctors on staff to allow you to focus on only one patient,” Dr. Leland said firmly.
“I wasn’t planning to give up my other patients,” Harleen lied, hoping her disappointment didn’t show. “I propose to devote extra time to the Joker—”
“We have no budget for overtime,” Dr. Leland reminded her.
“I’ll do it on my own time.”
Dr. Leland didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “If I say no, you’re just going to keep coming back with more arguments, until you either get me to say yes, or I snap and start taking hostages. Am I right?”
Harleen blinked. “I’m not sure how to answer that.”
“Never mind.” Dr. Leland hesitated. “I have a feeling I’ll regret this and it will all end in tears before bedtime, but go ahead—under certain conditions. Namely, I want written daily reports documenting every moment you spend with that man. Be extremely careful—his cell is the one and only room that has no monitoring.”
Harleen blinked at her. “That’s… surprising.
I’d have thought you’d have him under all kinds of surveillance.”
Dr. Leland sighed. “First of all, we can’t afford all kinds of surveillance. We make do with keeping an orderly, sometimes two, outside his door twenty-four/seven. And second, the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement is the one place in Arkham that no one, not even the Joker, has ever managed to break out of.”
Harleen wasn’t sure she believed the Joker’s cell wasn’t monitored beyond an orderly with his ear pressed to the door but she told herself to let it go and just take the win.
“Any change in medication has to be okayed by me well ahead of time,” Dr. Leland was saying, “and if I tell you no, it’s no. And if I decide to shut it down, you don’t try to get around me. Or you’ll find yourself on the wrong end of a disciplinary action. Are we clear?”
“Sure, boss, sure,” Harleen said in her tough-Brooklyn-cookie voice. “Anything you say, I’m on the case.”
Instead of laughing, Dr. Leland stared at her stonily. “This isn’t a joke, Dr. Quinzel.”
“No, of course not,” Harleen said quickly. She had only wanted to dispel the tension. Batman probably never dispelled the tension with a joke, so nobody else should, either. Unless they wanted to end up in Arkham Asylum’s deepest, darkest sub-basement.
Harleen marveled; Batman had made joking a crime.
Before Harleen embarked on her program of concentrated therapy with the Joker, Dr. Leland insisted she read or reread everything about him—not just his patient file, which was as thick as the latest edition of the DSM, but also his arrest reports, correspondence from various experts and authorities, and writing by the Joker himself, which Harleen was most interested in.
There was quite a lot of it, ranging from lively and chaotic to cold and focused; to surprisingly astute; to disturbing things she was certain he’d written specifically to bait his doctors. Any writing he’d done at Arkham was in crayon, which didn’t always photocopy well. One more reason why Harleen intended to get her hands on the originals—she had to feel the texture of the actual paper and see how much pressure he had applied with whatever crayons he’d used. All of that, she was sure, would be of great importance if she were to understand him well enough to help him, not to mention write a book about him.
Harleen would gladly have talked anything over with Dr. Leland, but her boss was busier than usual, juggling her caseload with unannounced visits from board members. Harleen felt sorry for her. The board members had a knack for showing up at the most inconvenient times, often with experts in tow, expecting Dr. Leland to essentially make more hours in the day to meet with them.
At the same time, however, Harleen’s feelings toward Dr. Leland had cooled somewhat since she had come to Arkham. Part of it was simply the end of the honeymoon period. Another part was that, like all authority figures, Dr. Leland sometimes felt the need to remind everyone she was the boss.
But it wasn’t just that. The latest discussion about Batman bothered her. She tried to understand Joan Leland’s point of view but it seemed so off. Batman might have the approval of the police department—even the police commissioner was pro-Batman—but it didn’t change the fact of law. Batman was a criminal who wasn’t locked up because he only picked on other criminals.
So good intentions made the difference. But that begged the question: How did anyone know Batman’s intentions really were good? By that token, if the Joker promised he meant no harm to innocent bystanders, only other criminals, they should release him immediately.
Okay, not really—not yet, anyway. The Joker needed a lot of therapy before Dr. Leland would even consider moving him out of the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement.
But if the Joker actually could be released—which Harleen privately thought might not be impossible with the right program of concentrated therapy—he would be sent to a halfway house in a city where the police department openly colluded with a criminal. But the criminal was Batman and Batman was a good guy.
Which raised another important question: how good was he really? The fancy car and all those fancy high-tech gadgets wouldn’t come cheap. Ergo, Batman had to be a rich guy—and not just rich, super-rich, a billionaire at least. No one had ever become a billionaire by being a great humanitarian.
Perhaps Batman was a group effort—a bunch of super-rich guys who shared the costs. But why would super-rich guys do that—for tax breaks? Money laundering? Or just to have their own private cop?
Or maybe Batman was blackmailing them into paying for everything. Was that the kind of thing a good guy did?
She was getting sidetracked. Harleen pulled her attention back to the report she was supposed to be writing about one of her other patients. Dr. Leland had sent her a memo reminding her not to neglect them, which Harleen found especially irritating. She had already promised she wouldn’t. If Dr. Leland didn’t know she was a conscientious therapist by now, she never would. Even with patients like Phil “the Phish” Phrobisher.
Phil “the Phish” had been an arsonist-for-hire. Anyone who wanted to burn down a property for the insurance contacted the Phish and their problems went up in smoke. He charged half the going rate and was so skilled, investigators seldom found any definitive signs of arson—no burn patterns that indicated the use of accelerants or improvised explosive triggers.
The man had a good streak but his luck finally ran out. He was caught in the act of inducing an electrical fire with his laptop by an IT expert consulting for Gotham PD. There were whispers that the expert had actually been a hacker hired by Phil’s competition in cooperation with a group of insurance companies desperate to stop Phil before they all went broke. Only in Gotham, Harleen thought.
Phil the Phish was a genuine firebug—he really liked burning things and he didn’t care whether the properties were empty or not. There had been a number of deaths, six of them occurring in the fire that had put him away.
Everyone had expected him to be troublesome. But as long as he could watch fires on his laptop—news, movies, or TV shows, Phil wasn’t fussy—he was docile enough. In fact, he had never seen any of his own fires in person, only on a screen, which was atypical. Firebugs usually loved witnessing their handiwork as it happened.
He was difficult to communicate with because he didn’t like looking away from his computer. Harleen had done her best but Phil showed no sign that he cared. As long as he was allowed to watch fires on his laptop, he was content.
One afternoon, at the end of another fruitless attempt to reach him, Harleen had said, in a fit of exasperation, “Don’t you want to get better someday?”
The question had astonished him. “‘Get better someday?’” he said, as if the words were a foreign language. “I’m the best right now.”
Then he had put on Gone with the Wind and fast-forwarded to the burning of Atlanta. Apparently that one never got old.
But then, there was no percentage in getting well for him. According to the terms of his commitment, once he was declared legally sane, he would go on trial for arson and murder. A conviction might encourage investigators to reopen old cases, a prospect that didn’t thrill anyone who had collected a big insurance payout.
It occurred to Harleen that if she took a look at Arkham Asylum’s finances, in particular the record of donations received since Phil the Phish’s commitment, she could probably figure out which commercial property owners in Gotham City had a vested interest in Phil’s remaining mentally ill for the rest of his life.
But if she did, would Dr. Leland congratulate her on her crimefighting? Or would the loss of desperately needed funds give Dr. Leland a good reason to fire her?
Dr. Leland might feel differently if Batman dropped by to give her a pat on the back. Kudos on your excellent detective work, Dr. Quinzel, Batman might say. Her boss would swoon.
Abruptly Harleen felt ashamed of her thoughts. She was a doctor, not a cop—she was supposed to treat her patients, not investigate them.
What if she talked to a detective at GCPD?
Oh, su
re, that was a great idea. Had she actually forgotten what had happened the last time she’d gone to the police to report a crime? They’d arrested her father for getting beaten up, thugs had planned to kill her mother, and she’d almost been handed over to a perv. (Delvecchio. Bruno Delvecchio. She was still going to get the s.o.b.)
God only knew what would happen if she went to Gotham City cops. If she got nervous and cracked a joke in her tough-Brooklyn-cookie voice, they’d call Batman to lock her up in Arkham. Probably in the cell next door to Poison Ivy, and Dr. Leland would go along with it because Harleen hadn’t grown up around here.
Whew. Just thinking about it made Harleen feel as if she’d had a close call. Which was totally silly. Nonetheless, she was going to stay away from cops, and Batman, too. Better safe than sorry.
Harleen told herself to think more constructively, the way she had when she’d come up with the idea to get the women together. Even if it hadn’t worked, the idea itself had been constructive, a positive action. Like writing a book, for instance—that was still a good idea, too, only now her subject would be the Joker.
It had to be more than just a lurid true-crime book, though. Sure, there needed to be a bit of tell-all exposé for the sake of selling it. But it had to come across clearly that Gotham City made criminals via its own special recipe—one part felony, one part cosplay—along with the double standard embraced by the police and endorsed by the courts, which followed one set of rules for Batman and a different set for everyone else. Under those conditions, it was a wonder that half of Gotham’s population hadn’t been declared criminally insane. And of those who were presently committed to Arkham, how many were people who had merely pissed Batman off?
Unbidden, the mental image of Dr. Leland reading her book bloomed in her mind’s eye. She didn’t look impressed at Harleen’s insights; she looked sad and betrayed. I shouldn’t have trusted you—after all, you’re not from around here.
Maybe she could paint her boss as the unwitting victim of a corrupt system, someone trying to do good while fighting against a rising tide of chaos and corruption.