by Paul Dini
The sight of him thrusting his face into the camera and urging people to steal cream pies and hit cops with them made her rethink her position on Batman. The Joker called himself the Clown Prince of Crime but his humor came with a body count. If this was how the criminal element rolled in Gotham, maybe Batman really was a hero.
Harley decided Gotham City had to be a psychiatric gold mine.
* * *
While Harley never gave up trying to do better academically, gymnastics was where she shone most brightly. Liliana Lewenchuk’s little star became a great big nova, throwing herself into every competition and coming away with top marks. Harley never again achieved a perfect score like she had that day in her high-school gym, but then, she never expected to. That had been a once-in-a-lifetime achievement, and something most people would never experience. The only thing that bothered her were the comments about the Olympics.
What an incredible talent—she’s so brilliant. Too bad she never competed in the Olympics.
It rankled Harley; as if all the years of practice and training, all her ability, all her championships and medals counted for nothing. She herself had no regrets. Every four years, she watched another group of little girls on the floor or the balance beam or the uneven parallel bars, their faces hard with concentration, showing none of the joy she herself felt when she took flight, and she wasn’t sorry she hadn’t been one of them. Her mother had never been able to afford an Olympic-class training program but Harley felt more like she’d dodged a bullet than missed the boat. What was so great about being washed up in your twenties? She pushed herself as hard in the gym as she did in her classes, not for a medal but because it felt good.
Why did so many people seem to think that you were either an Olympian or you were a zero? It simply wasn’t true. But people would believe whatever they chose to, even when evidence to the contrary was staring them right in the face. Harley didn’t know why that was and it gave her one more reason to go into psychiatry, to see if she could find out.
* * *
As Harley’s college education progressed, she became adept at reading people. It was a skill she had inherited from her father—con men had to be good at reading people and sizing up a situation at short notice. Not that it occurred to Harley to think of it in that way. Harley made use of her gift for people-reading mostly without realizing what she was doing, and when she did, she associated it with all the psychology she’d learned.
Harley found that sometimes it wasn’t enough to be a conscientious student. Sometimes engaging emotionally with a subject, whether it was eighteenth-century English literature, twentieth-century world history, organic chemistry, abnormal psychology, or even principles of physics, could make the professor grade a bit more generously. Or even a lot more. Professors found less fault with students who seemed to be personally invested.
It was impossible to do this with every subject, of course, but it was possible to bluff—you just had to know the right keywords. This was why listening was so important, and Harley was positively adept at that. Being a lovely young woman didn’t hurt, either. Professors loved having the attention of an attractive young woman, and not just the men. Women enjoyed her company just as much. Harley liked being liked, and it seemed to make her even more likeable. She hadn’t thought life could ever get this good for someone like her.
Oh, once in a while, she got a not-so-good vibe from a professor and immediately understood they’d have happily traded sex for a grade. After a couple of unfortunate experiences, she learned what signals to watch for and how to stay several steps ahead, steering the situation—she used the term “manipulate.” They required more effort but she eventually came away with an A without even taking her shoes off. Which seemed to confirm the commonly held wisdom that the more attractive a person was, the more they could get away with.
After exposure to the larger world beyond Brooklyn, Harley came to the conclusion that most people weren’t so much bad, as they were simply at the mercy of their own weaknesses, which could produce at worst a whole lot of evil, and at the very least, mediocrity and tedium. And it seemed like so many people let themselves get used to mediocrity and tedium; instead of living, they just… faded, like old photographs. At times, Harley wanted to jump up and down and scream, just to interrupt the continuous march toward entropy.
Someday she was going to meet someone larger than life, someone who was all bright colors at maximum volume, who was a lot more than just the sum of their weaknesses.
She hoped so, anyway.
* * *
Med school was so challenging that Harley finally gave in and called her mother. Her mother sounded overjoyed to hear from her; before long they were chattering and comparing notes. Harley found herself getting to know her mother in a new and deeper way.
At the same time, however, Harley made sure she didn’t call too often. She was from Brooklyn—she was out. She wasn’t going to get sucked back into the old neighborhood and the old life, where mob bosses and thugs and fathers going to prison were nothing out of the ordinary.
Her mother was concerned about her going into psychiatry. It was a specialty that wasn’t quantifiable in the same way as cardiology or orthopedics, she told Harley. Sometimes it was hard to know if you were actually doing a patient any good; worse, continuous contact with neurotics could take you to a dark place it was hard to escape from.
But Harley was determined. The mind was an adventure, and Harley was very much interested in adventure.
Which brings us to the present…
…almost.
A mere two years ago…
Dr. Joan Leland had been at Arkham Asylum for fifteen years, and the Head of Psychiatry for the last six. She was the first woman to serve in the position and, barring unforeseen circumstances, she planned to be there until she retired twenty years from now. It was what she wanted, but her predecessor Dr. Antonio Lopez had told her it was just as well. After you’d been at Arkham for an extended period of time, changing jobs could be difficult. Other doctors tended to be nervous around you, as if you might be as dangerous as the inmates.
She had to admit, albeit reluctantly, there was something to that. When she attended medical conferences, her colleagues looked at her apprehensively, as if they had no idea what she would do next. Once, after a long day of lectures and panel discussions, she’d joined a few other psychiatrists in the bar for drinks and tried breaking the ice with a joke about the voices in her head taking the night off. Within five minutes, her colleagues had decided to go to bed early.
But it was Joan Leland’s innate sense of duty that had made her decide to stay at Arkham. It wasn’t easy to find doctors and nurses willing to work in a place that housed the most dangerous psychotics and psychopaths in the country. It wasn’t just the fact that the job could be dangerous—everyone on the staff had been through several unpleasant incidents, and even the minor ones could be hard to shake off. Despite security measures tighter than any other hospital (and even a few prisons), inmates sometimes escaped; the staff and their families became targets, for payback, for sadistic compulsions, or simply for the hell of it.
There was a team of burly “orderlies” as well as a state-of-the-art security system to deal with the job’s inherent dangers. They had nothing comparable for the larger problem—viz., many of the patients were broken beyond repair.
This was antithetical to the whole concept of the practice of medicine. The conscientious doctor was supposed to find some way to treat a patient, or if all else failed, administer palliative care to relieve their suffering. Treating mental illness wasn’t the same as treating a disease like cancer or emphysema or COPD. But advances in pharmacology had produced better psychotropic drugs. Many patients who in an earlier time would have been institutionalized and forgotten now had a chance at some kind of life. But these weren’t the kind of patients who usually ended up at Arkham.
The vast majority of mentally ill people were more likely to be victims of crime th
an perpetrators. Many patients in Arkham, however, were dangerous not simply because they were insane but because they were psychopaths. Psychopathy was incurable and difficult to treat or just manage even in sane criminals; prison therapists had learned to their horror that therapy only taught psychopaths how to fool a parole board.
A psychotic psychopath was the patient from hell. For one thing, you couldn’t be absolutely sure they were psychotic; thus, medication might be pointless. Worse, the patient might hoard pills to sell to other patients or unscrupulous staff members, usually orderlies—but not always.
It was hard to fill staff vacancies at all, let alone find someone with an unwavering moral compass, flawless ethics, and nerves of steel to withstand the ambience of a place full of crazy, dangerous people, for what the state considered a decent, even competitive salary.
In Arkham Asylum, nothing was what it seemed. Things could change from moment to moment. You had to second-guess everything, even third- or fourth-guess it, and do it fast. This was not what most people who became doctors or nurses really wanted to do.
Most doctors wanted to heal, or at least help. They had come to the profession with ideals, planning to follow the noble tradition of Hippocrates. A lot of them were surprised to find, when they finally became real, live physicians, that Hippocrates’ instruction to “First, do no harm” wasn’t actually included in the formal oath. Nonetheless, Dr. Leland knew as well as anyone this sentiment was foremost in all doctors’ minds and hearts when they began their careers.
There was a lot more to the Hippocratic Oath than Primum non nocere: it included, among other things, the art of medicine as well as the science, compassion, and the willingness to share knowledge, as well as the admonition to avoid both over-treatment and therapeutic nihilism.
* * *
There had been six full-time psychiatrists at Arkham until Dr. Vincenzo had retired. Dr. Leland had prepared herself for a long, arduous search for someone to replace him but, to her astonishment, an application came in the day after Vincenzo left. And mirabile dictu, not from someone who had graduated last in their med-school class and barely got through residency but from the accomplished young woman Dr. Leland was about to show around the facility.
Dr. Harleen Quinzel arrived for her first day on the job in the same kind of seriously professional outfit she’d worn for her interview. The tailored navy blue suit, cream-colored silk blouse, straight skirt, and conservative black pumps made her look like she always knew exactly what to do. The no-nonsense black-framed glasses added to the effect, as did her neat French roll hairdo. Her appearance projected confident competence, but if you looked twice, you’d notice she was also gorgeous, which had been why Dr. Leland had hesitated to hire her, even with her amazing med-school transcript and the many glowing references, all of which had checked out. So here she was, about to give this young, unwary woman a tour of what Dr. Lopez had called Hell’s waiting room.
They had just come up the short flight of stairs from the mezzanine level where all the doctors’ offices were located and started down the main corridor in Long-Term Wing A when the red and yellow ceiling lights began to flash and the alarms went off. Even after fifteen years, Joan Leland always jumped when this happened, but lovely, young Dr. Quinzel didn’t even flinch—she only looked around, eyebrows raised in an expression of mild curiosity.
“Code Croc!” yelled Armand LaDue over the PA system. “I repeat, Code Croc! This is not a drill!”
Dr. Leland felt a flash of irritation. Only Armand felt compelled to say not a drill, even though everyone would know it wasn’t. Arkham didn’t have drills, only emergencies.
“All personnel clear the halls and common spaces! Security only!” Armand went on. “I repeat, security only!”
Dr. Leland turned to Dr. Quinzel and took her elbow. “We need to go back to my office—” she began. But Dr. Quinzel wasn’t listening. She was looking at the end of the hall where Killer Croc had just appeared in all his hideous, scaly glory.
The Croc was definitely one of the more eye-catching Arkham inmates, as big as their biggest orderlies, with scaly green skin, a mouth full of nasty, sharp teeth, and hungry, reptilian eyes. Dr. Leland didn’t know if normal crocodiles ever made growling noises but Killer Croc certainly did, and it was one of the most frightening things Joan Leland had ever heard, the sound of an inhuman beast that had burst out of a nightmare to attack the real world. He had been a man once and technically he still was—his DNA, though mutated, wasn’t purely reptilian and his brain waves were human. But none of that mattered when he was bounding toward you with a murderous roar.
The inmates in the rooms lining the corridor began howling and jeering. The lights were still flashing, the alarms were still whooping, and Armand LaDue was still yelling on the PA. Joan Leland’s world suddenly started tilting sideways; she ordered herself to get a grip. This was no time to feel dizzy. But the world went on tilting as Killer Croc came at them, his brutish gaze fixed on the tasty morsel that was Dr. Harleen Quinzel.
Dr. Quinzel casually reached out and took a fire extinguisher off the wall beside her. Dr. Leland had just enough time to wonder if the woman thought the place was on fire before Killer Croc leaped. With a smooth, practically casual motion, Arkham’s newest staff psychiatrist swung the extinguisher forward and up, hitting Killer Croc squarely in his most sensitive spot.
The Croc’s roar went up three octaves as he collapsed on the floor a few feet from the round toes of Dr. Quinzel’s tasteful black pumps, holding his crotch and rolling from side to side. A second later, the orderlies pounced on him with sedatives and wrapped him up in a canvas cocoon.
“You okay, Doc?” one of them asked Dr. Leland, looking as boggled as she felt.
She nodded. As they carried the still-whimpering Croc away, she turned to Dr. Quinzel, who was busily inspecting the extinguisher.
“No damage,” Dr. Quinzel said cheerfully, “but it’ll have to be recharged next month.” She put it back on the wall, then smiled brightly at Dr. Leland. “You were saying?”
“I was?” Dr. Leland said.
Dr. Quinzel’s smile became even brighter. “About the new neuroleptics?”
“Oh, yes.” Dr. Leland still felt a bit shaky but at least the world wasn’t tilting anymore. “We have new neuroleptics.”
“How new?” asked Dr. Quinzel chattily.
“Some are recent releases,” Dr. Leland said. “But a couple aren’t on the market yet.”
Dr. Quinzel’s eyes widened behind her no-nonsense glasses. “Tell me about those.”
* * *
Within thirty minutes, everyone on the premises had heard how the utterly unflappable new doctor had taken down the Croc in full attack mode, then stood over him chatting with Dr. Leland until the orderlies hauled him away. Oh, and she was also a knockout.
Sitting in his room at the very bottom of criminally insane hell, the Joker was fascinated. He listened to several different accounts from both staff and patients. They all told the same story—a hot young blonde clocked the Croc in the family jewels without flinching, like he wasn’t the most grotesque thing she’d ever seen. She was described variously as Helen of Troy, the goddess Athena, a Valkyrie, and the reincarnation of an actress who was actually still alive.
This was the woman he’d been waiting for, the Joker thought. Someone who wasn’t going to bore him to death. Who might actually be worth whatever time and effort it would take to destroy her.
He couldn’t wait.
Harleen had been prepared to share an office with one or two other people. At Arkham, however, there was plenty of office space to go around. Her office was big, too—not enormous, but you could open the door without it hitting the desk. There was even a window. This was Harleen’s office, not Harley’s.
No one would have called the view scenic—Arkham Asylum was out in the middle of nowhere, in an area where the landscape wasn’t inspiring even in summer. Just outside her window was a very old, twisted tree. She w
asn’t sure what kind of tree it was; no one else seemed to know, either. Dr. Leland had warned her not to touch the weird, misshapen leaves; the inmate who had been taking care of it had done something to it and now the leaves produced a highly toxic substance, worse than poison ivy.
When the wind blew from just the right direction, the long, skinny branches at the end of one of the gnarled boughs would tap on her window like someone trying to get her attention. Harleen thought she could probably have climbed out onto it if she were ever trapped in her office and needed a quick getaway. Which was a rather silly idea. Arkham Asylum was pretty outré and, as she’d seen on her first day, it could even be dangerous. But thinking she might need to use the tree outside her office to escape—that wasn’t even crazy, only childish. It was more like something that would occur to a seven-year-old, not a woman twenty years older with a medical degree.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t have been a silly kid’s fantasy for seven-year-old Harleen. That little girl hadn’t been given to idle make-believe; she hadn’t even believed in Santa Claus. When she had stared down a mobster’s hired muscle on a pier at Coney Island in the middle of the night, it hadn’t been Santa who had come to her rescue.
There was a tap at the door and Dr. Leland poked her head in. “I thought we’d continue introducing you to the schizophrenics today.”