by Paul Dini
Mary Louise burst into tears. “It’s not my fault!” she sobbed. “It’s yours! You did it!”
“She’s right, Harriet,” Pamela Isley said, still tired of it all. She’d given up trying to reach her hair and was now studying her manicure. “It’s your fault for being deliberately obtuse. I knew what you meant, but I’ve been stuck in here with you long enough to grow a redwood. I know Kiki Dee and the rest of it is supposed to be Cockney rhyming slang—”
“It’s not supposed to be, it is,” Harriet snapped. “’Ave a butcher’s on the web, see if I’m right!”
“—but the doc probably thought you were having a stroke,” Pamela Isley finished with a long, heavy sigh. “If I had a time machine, I’d go back to the days when I couldn’t understand a word you said. Made it so much easier to block you out.”
The tension in the room was all but electric. Behind her, Harleen heard the guard open the door and beckon a few orderlies in. She twisted around in her chair briefly and held up one hand to tell them to stay back. They were ready to swarm over the women and subdue them, and she couldn’t let that happen. She had to show all of them she didn’t need a goon squad to rush in with restraints and tranquilizers every time someone had an emotion. Especially when they were already in restraints.
“Time out, everybody,” Harleen said, making the hand-signal. “There’s only one thing we need right now—a nice cup of tea.”
Instantly Harriet’s demeanor went from belligerent to delighted. “Don’t mind if I do, ducks. Earl Grey, if you please.”
“Herbal,” said Pamela Isley, more jaded than ever.
Harley turned to Magpie and Mary Louise. “Shiny,” Magpie said sulkily, her eyes fixed on Harley’s throat.
“Pop,” Mary Louise demanded. “Not nasty-wasty tea. Pop.”
Harleen turned to the orderlies. “Is anyone writing this down?” she asked. “Harriet wants Earl Grey tea, herbal for Pamela—” she hesitated for a moment. “Water with lots of shiny ice cubes for Margaret Pye, and soda for Mary Louise, something without caffeine—ginger ale or grape or something. And green tea for me. Bring enough for more than one cup or glass, please.”
“We’ll probably have to take a couple of them to the bathroom,” an orderly named Oscar said.
“That’s what they pay you for,” Harleen said archly. “Though you should have a female nurse to chaperone. And cookies.”
The orderly stared at her, baffled. “Cookies?”
“Bring a plate of cookies with our beverages,” Harleen told him. “Refreshments aren’t complete without cookies.”
* * *
“Now this is what I call civilized, ducky,” Harriet said as the orderlies wheeled in a cart. None of the other patients argued; even Pamela Isley sat quietly as an orderly set a cup of herbal tea on the wide arm of her chair. She removed the teabag, set it in the saucer, and picked up the cup. Unfortunately, the chain attached to the cuff on her wrist didn’t allow her to bring it all the way to her lips. If she wanted to drink, she had to bend her head awkwardly. It was the same for the others.
Harleen was appalled. “Could we please adjust these restraints to give everyone a better range of movement?” she demanded, not hiding her irritation. “These women should be allowed to eat and drink without contorting themselves!”
The orderlies hesitated and Harleen turned to look at the armed guard. “Do as she says,” the guard told them. The orderlies looked dubious but they obeyed.
“Thank you. I’ll call if I need anything else,” Harleen said when they were done and jerked her head toward the door.
“As I was sayin’,” Harriet Pratt purred when the orderlies were gone. “Civilized. Ain’t I right now, ducks?”
The question seemed to be addressed to Pamela Isley; it looked like one of the vines had fallen into her cup. Harleen wondered if she should tell her not to do that. But why? She wasn’t dipping her vine in someone else’s drink and she didn’t seem to be doing herself any harm.
Sipping her green tea, Harleen let them have a few minutes to enjoy their respective drinks. In truth, she needed a minute to get over feeling stupid and guilty. She should have thought of this without Harriet Pratt’s histrionics. All her self-righteousness about treating patients with respect and it had never occurred to her it would be nice to serve refreshments in the middle of the afternoon. It was the way they did things in the outside world—the civilized world.
From now on, their sessions would always include a refreshment cart, Harleen decided. She would try to make these meetings more like an oasis of calm and dignity—or as much as they could be with the patients chained to their chairs.
* * *
“I almost intervened and shut you down for good,” Dr. Leland said later when she dropped by Harleen’s office. “But the way you took charge of the room—not just the patients but the staff, too—gave me a good feeling. I’m inclined to let these sessions continue and see where they go. With the refreshment cart,” she added.
“The orderlies told you all that?” Harleen said, surprised.
Dr. Leland shook her head. “Security showed me the video. Most rooms in Arkham are monitored. You know that.”
Harleen looked around nervously. There had been a few times she’d changed her pantyhose here, and once she’d had to staple a broken bra strap. Had she been giving Security a peep show? She was about to say something but Dr. Leland was still talking.
“…keep your guard up. It’s okay for the patients to relax but don’t give them the idea that they can get familiar. Never forget they’re criminally insane. Make sure they’re clear about your boundaries and they don’t overstep.”
Harleen wanted to ask whose boundaries Security respected but Dr. Leland received a text and hurried back to her office. Disappointed, Harleen made a note to do all her pantyhose changing and bra repair in a stall in the doctors’ lavatory, although for all she knew the stalls were monitored, too. If they were, there was probably a horror story behind it. Arkham was a very bizarre place to work.
Maybe this was why Dr. Leland was so caught up in structure and convention. She was so concerned with Harleen’s maintaining proper boundaries with the group but never considered how the women felt about being forced to participate in restraints, in actual chains. Women in chains—metal, not metaphorical. No doubt the rattle and clink kept boundary issues from slipping their minds.
Even if there was no chance these women would leave Arkham, Harleen saw no reason not to try getting them out of their chains. If she helped them enough that they would be allowed to walk from one place to another and to sit in ordinary chairs like regular people rather than being chained up like animals, how much better their lives would be. Maybe they’d be more receptive to therapy rather than fighting it.
Just because they were permanently incarcerated didn’t mean they shouldn’t be helped.
* * *
Harleen was nervous about the third session. Dr. Percival had made a stupid joke in the staff meeting comparing it to a third date. Danielle Duval, the head nurse for the lighter-security ward on the fifth floor, asked him with a straight face if he’d ever had a third date himself, and if so, how long ago. More people had laughed at that one, which had put Dr. Percival’s nose out of joint and made Harleen feel a little better.
But it was Dr. Leland who had really put her on edge. Sometimes she thought Dr. Leland made a point of doing that right before a session. She had stopped in at Harleen’s office half an hour before the session to repeat herself about maintaining proper boundaries, staying alert and observant, and remembering that Magpie and Mary Louise could be as cunning as Poison Ivy. Harleen had very nearly corrected her with the patient’s real name as an example of a boundary issue, but she resisted. Having an argument with her boss wouldn’t put her in an ideal frame of mind to meet with her patients.
The session proceeded without incident, although it seemed to Harleen that everyone, including the orderlies and the armed guard at the door, were on
edge to some degree. Emotions could be contagious, especially negative ones like anxiety and apprehension; Harleen made a lengthy note in her personal journal that this was what she really had to be careful of. Boundaries be damned—projecting a confident, positive attitude was far more important, and she should be more mindful about that.
Despite her determination, Harleen came away from the fourth session more dismayed. The conversation had been more aimless and unfocused than in their first session. She had tried to facilitate a discussion but no one had responded to any of her openers. Instead of blubbering, Mary Louise had spent the time mimicking Poison Ivy, pretending she was bored, and saying nothing other than Nasty-wasty Arkham. But at least it proved her baby act really was a put-on.
Even Magpie had been quieter than usual, only saying Shiny! a few times in a sulky voice, as if making an accusation. And Harriet had been almost mute, responding to whatever Harleen said to her with a grunt or an emphatic shrug that rattled her chains.
It pained Harleen to admit it but she had to take a page from Dr. Leland’s playbook and add more structure after all. The women had to understand that the sessions weren’t merely something to break up the afternoon routine, but a purposeful, therapeutic program. As such, there were goals that the women were expected to achieve. So starting with the fifth session she would have an agenda for every meeting. The women might not like being pushed, but she couldn’t let them get away with doing nothing. That wasn’t therapy; that was entropy.
* * *
“I’d like to do something new today,” Harleen said when they were all settled with their various drinks.
“There’s a new way to sit around in chains and talk about nothing?” Pamela Isley said in her standard, tired-of-life voice. “Oh, joy. I never dared dream.”
Harleen told herself to be positive. “At our second session, we talked about what we wanted to get out of these sessions—”
“Well, ducky, that’s what I want,” Harriet said, laughing. “I want to get out of these bloody sessions!”
“If that’s true,” Harleen said, refusing to be discouraged, “you have to have a plan—”
“I have a plan,” Pamela Isley said languidly. “I’m going to put Batman’s head on a pike.”
“Me, too!” said the other three in unison. Harleen’s jaw dropped. She hadn’t thought Magpie would ever say anything other than Shiny!
“It’s Batman what put most of us in this dungeon,” Harriet added to Harleen, as if in a confidential aside. “If it weren’t for bloody Batman, we’d all be—”
“Shiny!” proclaimed Magpie.
Harriet chuckled. “Right you are, ducks. We’d all be shiny ’n’ happy ’n’ runnin’ free with the wind in our ’air—”
“Nasty-wasty Batty-man!” Mary Louise began to cry. “I did-unt do it, I did-unt! It was-unt my fault but he did-unt care! Hate, hate, hate!”
Instead of complaining about Mary Louise, Pamela Isley launched into a story about her last encounter with Batman, the one that had put her in Arkham. Harleen’s first impulse was to try to steer them back to the topic of setting goals, then she caught herself. Pamela Isley was talking—not taking shots, but talking about something that had happened to her. And without acting like she was so bored she could barely stay awake. Magpie had uttered a different word—no, two of them. And Mary Louise’s blubbering had subsided; like the other two, she was listening to what Pamela Isley was saying.
The hell with structure, Harleen thought. If she cut this off now, Pamela Isley would shut down and the rest would follow suit. She might never get any of them to open up again. Maybe they’d just needed the right subject. It was like they’d all been wandering around lost in their respective darknesses and then suddenly they’d all found the North Star simultaneously.
That would make a fascinating article, Harleen thought. Or a chapter in a book.
She started making notes as she sipped her tea. Batman was the key to breaking down the walls they had put up. So what if their feelings weren’t terribly positive? Getting through to them was what mattered, and if she could only do that by way of something they all hated, so what? It united them, made them a real group—
“Except for the nasal filters,” Pamela Isley said, and looked directly at Harleen for the first time.
“Nasal filters,” Harleen said, nodding as if she’d heard every word.
“Of all things.” Pamela Isley shook her head. “Nasal filters never occurred to me.”
“Why do you think that is?” Harleen asked. The question sounded inane even to her but it was the only one she could think of. How could she have let her mind wander when Pamela Isley had actually been saying something?
“They just didn’t.” Pamela gave her a contemptuous look and turned back to the other women. “If Batman hadn’t been wearing them, my special strain of night-blooming jasmine would have knocked him flat on his bat ass, and he’d be fertilizing my garden even as we speak. Instead, he got me committed to this place, where you can’t get decent sunlight even from a southern exposure.”
“Shiny,” Magpie said, her voice mournful.
Harleen wished she’d paid closer attention. But even as she thought it, her mind was trying to wander again. This was a hell of a time to lose her psychiatry mojo, she thought. Then she wondered when she had started saying things like mojo.
“Now, Pammie-luv, I can tell you exactly where you went Pete Tong,” Harriet was saying in a know-it-all tone.
“Oh, do tell.” Pamela’s voice dripped with sarcasm.
“You took the blighter on by yourself! You can’t go up against the big bad Bat alone! You need a gang backin’ you up, along with a partner you can trust with your very life.” Harriet’s smugness was so intense Harleen could have sworn the air shimmered around her. “Takin’ on Batman without anyone else—well, that’s just mad.”
“Oh, right.” Pamela looked down her nose at Harriet. “A woman is nothing without a man. How did I forget that?”
“Now, now, luv, everybody needs a best mate, someone who’s got your back,” Harriet went on. “No man is an island, and no woman, either. You can’t be workin’ without a net. Me old china, we make a perfect set, we do, him bein’ the Mad Hatter and me bein’—”
“Shiny,” Magpie declared.
“March ’Arriet,” she corrected.
“And yet, in the end, you didn’t do any better.” Pamela waved one hand and the vines seemed to copy the gesture. Only they couldn’t have, Harleen thought; they were plants, not snakes. Although right now, they looked like plant–snake hybrids. “You’re in here with us and your best buddy is where? At someone else’s tea party, I guess—he certainly isn’t at this one. That’s what you get for being some man’s appendage. When it’s crunch time, they always throw you under the bus to save themselves. Always.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Harriet snapped.
“Really?” Pamela gave a short, scornful laugh. “Can’t tell just by looking.”
“Shiny!” Magpie put in.
All the woman turned to Harleen, their faces expectant.
“Well, this subject is—is difficult,” Harleen said, speaking slowly, trying to gather her thoughts. The cup in her hand was suddenly so heavy, hard to hold up. Like her eyelids.
Meanwhile, the vines in Pamela’s hair were getting longer, flowing over her shoulders and down her arms… except they couldn’t have been. They couldn’t have grown all the way down to the chains. And they certainly couldn’t be breaking the links as if they were flimsy plastic right before her eyes.
I did not just see that, Harleen thought as the vines moved on to free Harriet, then Magpie, and Mary Louise. I’m hallucinating. It didn’t happen.
“Oh, but it did happen,” Pamela Isley said, no longer bored. “You’re not hallucinating.”
How did I speak aloud and not know it, Harleen wondered, watching as Pamela got up from her chair.
Pamela was smiling as she came toward her. “Did you kn
ow that roots can break through metal pipes buried in the ground? Even crack the foundation of a house?”
All the women were getting up now. Then Pamela was looming over her, with more vines growing out of her hair. Harleen’s cup slipped out of her fingers and fell on the carpet with a distant thump.
The tea, Harleen realized.
“What’s the matter, ducks?” asked Harriet from somewhere behind Pamela. “Something amiss with your tea?” Her hand reached over Pamela’s shoulder to dangle a teabag in Harleen’s face.
“You know, I’m a doctor, too, even if it’s not the kind you are,” Pamela said. Her low voice was practically a purr but there was nothing soft about her expression. “Brand new Dr. Harleen Quinzel. It’s so obvious this is your first job.” She gave a short laugh. “What did you tell yourself you were doing—trying to make a difference? Striking a blow for the looney sisterhood? Or can you actually admit you want to use us Looney Ladies of Arkham to get famous by writing a trashy true-crime book?”
“Shiny! Shiny!” Magpie said shrilly.
Where was the guard? Where was Security? Wasn’t this room monitored?
“Don’t worry, ducks, we took care of the guard.” Harriet crowded in next to Pamela, still dangling the teabag from two fingers. It looked homemade and smelled all wrong. “And all anybody’s seein’ on the closed-circuit TV is us sittin’ nice ’n’ quiet like the good little Looney Ladies we are.”
How? Harleen thought. How?
“How what, luv?” Harriet cackled. “Be specific!”
“I did-unt mean to!” wailed Mary Louise and began hitting Harleen with her doll, hard, over and over. It was a lot heavier than any doll Harleen had ever had and squeaked Mama! on every blow.
“No! Stop!” Harleen pleaded. It was an enormous effort to speak but she had to get through to them. “I didn’t want to use you—I wanted to show how you’ve all been used! By the police! By the justice system! And most of all by Batman!”