DC Comics novels--Harley Quinn

by Paul Dini

  “And then he broke my nose,” he said.

  Harleen’s laughter cut off sharply, as if he had slapped her. No, she thought, trying to catch her breath. Please, no—

  “I still like to think he was aiming for my behind and missed,” the Joker added, his voice calm and matter-of-fact, as if he hadn’t just been laughing his head off with her for minutes on end. He’d pulled his pants up and he was back on the bed with the pillow between himself and the wall. “At least that’s what I told myself when I woke up in the hospital three days later.”

  “Three days later?” Harleen managed, her voice faint and horrified.

  “But hey, that’s the downside of comedy!” The Joker jumped to his feet again and spread his hands, grinning broadly. “You’re always taking shots from folks who don’t get the joke—like my old man.” His grin disappeared, replaced by an expression of pure loathing. “Or Batman.”

  The way he said Batman made it sound like a profanity, Harleen thought as he plumped down on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees. “Wow,” he said, shaking his head a little. “That was—” he thought for a few seconds. “Exhausting. I guess I’ve been holding that in for so long, I didn’t realize it would be so draining to let it go.” He turned to her with the expression of a man who had been struggling with something for years only to have it vanish, leaving him discombobulated and uncertain. “I know it’s time for our afternoon discussion but suddenly I’m just so tired. Would it be okay if I took a nap?”

  “Of course,” Harleen said. She was tempted to ask if she could stay with him in case he had a bad dream and then thought better of it. He was in a vulnerable state; she could give him a bad dream via the power of suggestion. Besides, he really needed to be alone for a while. She could go back to her office and write this up while it was still fresh in her mind.

  She needed some time to digest this herself. It wasn’t just that he had opened up to her for the first time—he had told her something he had never told anyone else. She knew it because after reading his file over and over and over, she had never come across an account of a trip to the circus or any mention of his father being either abusive or an alcoholic.

  This wasn’t just big—this was colossal. This was a game-changer.

  * * *

  Harleen went back through his files anyway, just to make sure. Then she asked Dr. Leland—the boss—if she had ever gotten wind of any abuse in the Joker’s background.

  “Not even a hint, although it’s likely it’s a no-brainer, as the kids used to say.” Dr. Leland had several file folders spread out on her desk; all of them seemed to be financial records. She made a pained face. “Dr. Quinzel—Harleen—I’m sorry, you’ve caught me at the worst possible time. Ordinarily, I’d drop everything to sit down with you and we could hash this out until we were both satisfied. There’s a problem with Arkham’s financials—I’m sorry but it would take too long to explain—”

  “It’s okay, boss, you don’t have to,” Harleen said. She had a vague memory of something in the news about a possible corruption scandal; a couple of the names mentioned were on the Arkham board. Had Dr. Leland been caught up in it? She couldn’t imagine such a thing, but this was Arkham; anything was possible.

  “Is there something in particular you need?” Dr. Leland asked her, sounding harried.

  “Just information on the Joker’s first eighteen years,” she said.

  “We’ve already talked about that,” Dr. Leland replied, sounding even more harried. “Everything we’ve ever found connected to his childhood or adolescence has been falsified in some way, a forgery or whatever. We don’t even know exactly how old he is—we only have estimates based on medical and dental examinations. Close enough for government work but not much else.”

  “But we’re doing government work,” Harleen said.

  Dr. Leland was too busy looking for something among all the papers on her desk to comment.

  Abruptly, Harleen had another idea. “What if it’s something like witness protection?”

  The other woman straightened up, looking at her with an incredulous expression. “Now that’s one I’ve never heard.”

  “Not the real witness protection program,” Harleen added quickly. “But something like that. Maybe there was something the Joker was so afraid of that it wasn’t enough for him to assume a new identity—he had to completely obliterate his old one and become the Joker.”

  “There’s only one problem with your theory: anyone that scared would stay in hiding. The Joker has never hidden from anything or anyone.”

  “Because he knows whoever he’s afraid of isn’t interested in the Joker—they’re after the person he used to be. It’s possible. Highly unlikely, but not impossible.”

  “Too improbable,” Dr. Leland said. “I doubt anything scares that man. I doubt anything could.”

  “Isn’t that rather dehumanizing?” Harleen said.

  “Many sociopaths are thrill-seekers because they don’t feel fear, at least not in the sensible way the rest of us do,” Dr. Leland said. “They’re also talented liars. The Joker has lied so much, he may not even know the truth about himself anymore. It’s a bit hard to keep track when you keep losing touch with reality.”

  “But don’t you think that after so many years—a lifetime really—even the most accomplished liar would want to tell the truth to someone?”

  “Sure,” said Dr. Leland. “Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that liar is the Joker and that someone is you. I’m sorry, I’ve really got my hands full, so if there’s nothing else…?” Her expression said she hoped not.

  Harleen shook her head. “Just that I don’t think I’d want your job if they paid me a million dollars.”

  “Right now, I don’t want it, either,” said Dr. Leland, looking unhappy. “And if I can’t prove they don’t pay me even half that much, the Joker’s pathology will be the least of my problems.”

  * * *

  All the staff psychiatrists had treated the Joker at one time or another, some more than once. It had been standard practice to rotate his doctors simply because he was so difficult and stressful. A chat with Dr. Davis confirmed that he had, in fact, removed some of his notes from the Joker’s files.

  “Can I see them?” Harleen asked.

  “No,” Dr. Davis said flatly. “They’re gone. Destroyed.”

  Harleen was shocked. “Altering files—”

  “I didn’t alter anything,” Dr. Davis said, almost snapping. “I unaltered them. The Joker fed me a pack of lies. I removed the lies and repaired the record, to prevent problems in the future. You’d have done the same if it had been you.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Harleen said, offended.

  “Easy for you to say, because it wasn’t you,” he said grumpily. “This is Arkham Asylum. You don’t know how different it is because you’ve never worked anywhere else—you have no basis for comparison. We have to do things differently here. Otherwise the gargoyles would already have had us for lunch, in hideous and terrible ways. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to meet with a patient. A former patient of yours, as it happens. Dr. Leland has decided the best way for you to do your job is to make more work for me. I guess that’s why you have so much time to pore over old records and wonder what’s missing.”

  There goes a man with no sense of humor, Harleen thought, staring after him as he stumped away.

  As the weeks passed, Harleen became convinced the man the world called a homicidal madman was in fact a tortured soul crying out for the same thing everyone else wanted—love and acceptance.

  She was aware of how melodramatic that sounded. But people were melodramatic. People were messy, desperate, full of urgent emotions. Like in the half-remembered poem from one of her college lit classes, they fell upon the thorns of life, they bled. In the next moment, they were jumping for joy, and the moment after that, they would die for love.

  That was the human condition.

  Leaving that aside, she
decided the Joker was not a homicidal maniac. She knew a homicidal maniac when she saw one. She had come face to face with three of them in the middle of the night on Coney Island when she was seven years old and barely escaped with her life.

  When it came to homicidal maniacs, Harleen Quinzel was an authority.

  * * *

  Harleen had trouble organizing her jottings. Not because she couldn’t remember what they meant—just looking at them, she could remember what the Joker had said word for word. It was that it was becoming more difficult to write them up as reports for Dr. Leland, to strip out the raw thoughts and emotions that gave them meaning and make them into something cold and antiseptic.

  The subject admits to suffering childhood abuse—alcoholic father; father/son trip to circus (potential bonding experience)—subject beaten when prank went wrong—3 days in hospital!!

  Father <————> Batman?

  Harleen didn’t like referring to the Joker as “the subject.” She didn’t like calling any her patients “the subject,” even though it was standard terminology. It was supposed to help you maintain professional objectivity and avoid becoming personally involved with a patient. But Harleen thought it dehumanized the patients, objectifying them so they became their symptoms and case histories instead of human beings, something the Hippocratic Oath explicitly warned against.

  Maintaining professional distance made sense; doctors couldn’t make every patient personally important or it would tear them apart. Still, every patient deserved to be treated like a person, and not written off just because they’d been diagnosed as incurable or dangerous. For one thing, a person wasn’t a diagnosis. And for another, what if the diagnosis were wrong?

  Diagnostic errors happened in every area of medicine—tests gave false positives or negatives, people read X-rays or scans wrong or got them mixed up, and even the best doctors weren’t infallible, especially in psychiatry. A well-intentioned doctor could interpret symptomatic behavior in a particular way because of an unconscious bias, and no one would think to challenge it, because of the doctor’s reputation or position. And once in a while, someone like Hugo Strange came along and did all kinds of damage before anyone could stop him.

  In light of all these things, Harleen wasn’t surprised the Joker had been misdiagnosed. She had discovered the mistake only because her own unique life experiences had given her a special understanding most doctors didn’t have. She could see that labels like “homicidal” and “maniac” had been too easily applied to someone who was really just a lost, injured child trying to make the world laugh so it would love him—or at least not hit him so hard that he was unconscious for three days.

  Harleen understood that. She’d done the same thing on the worst night of her life. The Joker was a more extreme case; the very people who were supposed to take care of him and protect him had terrorized him so much in his childhood, he must have devised his own version of witness protection, disguising his true identity without having to hide from the world.

  Why not? The justice system had failed to protect him so he’d had to protect himself. And the system was still failing him. Instead of understanding him as the abused, terrified child he had been, it locked him up for being a victim.

  But he hadn’t let abuse and fear turn him into a tearful, quivering wreck. He had stood up to the world and fought back by making fun of it, and the system didn’t like that at all. They called that “having a bad attitude.” He’d refused to give up his self-worth. So the system had called in a specialist to teach him the error of his ways—viz., that state-approved terrorist and self-righteous bully, Batman.

  After that, the Joker hadn’t stood a chance. Once you got on Batman’s radar, there was apparently no way to get off it. You became his twisted idea of a hobby or project; he’d never stop making you miserable.

  Harleen pulled the file folders from her previous, less successful project with the female patients and reread her notes. Batman had loomed large in their anger. All the women had stories about being frightened, trapped, and overpowered as he’d taken them into custody. He’d never asked for their side of the story, never stopped to think that they might have been victims, not criminals.

  Sometimes Harleen wondered if Batman had ever been with the Brooklyn police department. He would have fit right in.

  When Dr. Patel applied for permission to take three of his patients swimming at the County Pool, all of Joan Leland’s alarm bells went off.

  Dr. Patel proposed to hire an unmarked prisoner transport van so no one would know these were Arkham inmates. The pool could be reserved for a private swim so they wouldn’t have to worry about members of the general public. The van would have two expert drivers, and Dr. Patel had lined up staff members willing to volunteer for extra duty. Should any problems occur, the patients could be quickly subdued and returned to Arkham.

  The safety and security arrangements weren’t what Dr. Leland was worried about. What had set off her alarm bells was the fact that the proposal was completely unlike Chetan Patel. He was a man of cool reserve who normally believed in keeping psychotic patients calm and avoiding excessive stimulation. In Dr. Patel’s view, their minds were already prone to chaos; many of them had visual and auditory hallucinations even when they weren’t agitated. Keeping them peaceful prevented undesirable behavior, which, in many cases, was the best anyone could hope for. Dr. Leland thought swimming sounded like the antithesis of what Dr. Patel was trying to accomplish.

  “On the contrary,” Dr. Patel told her when they met in her office to discuss it, “I’m not talking about a free-swim situation where they all splash around and jump off the diving board. I’m talking about attaching water wings or belts to my three most well-behaved patients so they can float quietly, perhaps with soft, New Age music in the background. There’d be enough room in an Olympic-sized pool for them to drift about calmly, each with a nurse to look after them so they wouldn’t bump into each other. Buoyed up, relieved of even the minimal struggle against gravity, they might even achieve a meditative state.”

  “I’m not so sure about the New Age music,” Dr. Leland said.

  The joke went past Dr. Patel unnoticed. “Then we’ll play recordings of whale songs,” he said. “I hear that’s even more calming. Very spiritual. These people are in dire need of something to feed their spirits, but without any dogma, of course.”

  “I don’t know about the patients but I’d like to try that myself,” Dr. Leland said.

  “So would I,” said Dr. Patel with a chuckle. “I’ve been familiarizing myself with various forms of hydrotherapy. There are flotation tanks where you float in very salty water with no sensory input—”

  “Forget it,” Dr. Leland told him firmly.

  “I know,” said Dr. Patel. “That kind of therapy might be appropriate for only a very few patients. It occurred to me while I was researching that we have to avoid becoming too set in our ways. There’s a fine line between calm and monotony. In our desire to avoid trouble, that line can become blurred to the detriment of patient care.”

  “Good point,” Dr. Leland said, meaning it even as she wondered about him. Patel was conscientious and kept current but he wasn’t an innovator. “I’d like to read this research of yours before I make a decision.”

  “I knew you would so I’ve prepared a folder I can email you as soon as I get back to my office.” Dr. Patel’s smile was actually eager, like he hadn’t spent a dozen years trying to erase the line between calm and monotony. “There are also a few videos but they aren’t too long—forty-five minutes at most. When would you like to meet again to discuss it?”

  “I’ll let you know,” she said.

  Dr. Patel’s smile faded. “Well, we’re all busy,” he said with a disappointed sigh. “But I wanted to move on this as soon as possible—”

  “I’m sorry I can’t tell you we’ll get together at the end of the week or first thing Monday,” Dr. Leland replied, irritated. “I’ve been subpoenaed to testify before the
grand jury in the corruption case and I have to prepare. There may be a preliminary hearing.”

  Now Dr. Patel looked utterly baffled. “What for?”

  Dr. Leland wondered if he were kidding now. “There have been financial irregularities connected to some Arkham board members. It’s been all over the news.”

  The man shook his head. “I never watch the news. Too agitating.” He started to get up.

  “One question before you go,” she said suddenly. “This swimming idea of yours—did you get it from Dr. Quinzel?”

  Dr. Patel’s dark brown eyes were astonished. “Good heavens, no. She’s the last person I’d get an idea from.”

  “Oh?” Dr. Leland’s eyebrows strained toward her hairline. “Do you have a problem with her? Or do you feel that I’m wrong to let her concentrate on one patient?”

  Dr. Patel hesitated, then sat down again, moved his chair a little closer to her desk and lowered his voice. “That was your decision to make,” he said. “And I know you’ve taken more of her patients so the rest of us wouldn’t be too overburdened. It’s not how I would have done things but I’m not in charge.”

  Dr. Leland nodded. “And your feelings about Dr. Quinzel?”

  “She’s young,” Dr. Patel said. “If it had been up to me, I don’t think I would have hired someone so inexperienced and, for lack of a better word, eager. She’s quite brilliant; I don’t dispute that. But she’s—well, young and brilliant. Compared to everyone else here, she’s practically an innocent. I don’t mean to disrespect her. I can see she’s intelligent and, personally, I like her. But I wouldn’t ask her to consult on one of my cases.”

  “You might feel differently if you’d seen her handle a fire extinguisher,” Dr. Leland said, more to herself. “Never mind. I’d just like to know where you got the idea.”