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 wasn’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.”
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.