“I’ve studied up on you,” Harleen told the Joker.

“Have you indeed?” The Joker was lying on the bed in his cell in a way that made him look like he was lying on a psychiatrist’s couch. Deliberately, of course. The man did nothing without reason or point. “I would expect nothing less from my psychiatrist.”

Harleen felt her heart thump as she made a note on her tablet with her stylus. My psychiatrist. Somehow he had imbued those two words with a possessive quality. It put her on her guard, but it also gave her a warm feeling. Inappropriate; she had to be above such reactions. She wasn’t socializing with this man and it was too soon for countertransference. (Wasn’t it?)

Abruptly she realized the Joker was staring at her expectantly. “I guess you didn’t hear me,” he said as heat rushed into her face. “I said, did you learn anything significant that all my numerous other doctors missed?”

“I heard you,” she lied, looking down at the tablet and pretending to read over extensive notes. “Give me a minute, I was just trying to decide where to begin. While I’m thinking, let me ask you a question: are you going to tell me anything you haven’t told all your numerous other doctors?”

The Joker smiled, but despite his chalk-white clown face, the expression was oddly serious. She had never seen that look before.

“Give me a minute,” he said. “I’m trying to decide where to begin.”

“You must be completely honest with me,” Harleen told him. “Otherwise—”

“—You won’t know how to help me and this won’t work,” he finished for her. “Heard it before. That gag’s so old, it’s got whiskers.”

“It may have whiskers, but it’s not a gag.” Harleen pushed her glasses up on her face and a strand of hair came loose just over her left ear. She would fix it later; grooming was inappropriate here, even something as slight as tucking a curl back into place. She had to maintain an air of strict formality to keep the doctor–patient boundary clear and well-defined.

“We’ll see about that,” the Joker said, chuckling.

“Excuse me?” Harleen stared at him, baffled.

“It’s all in the name, my dear. You do remember my name, don’t you? The Joker.”

“I do,” she told him smoothly. “You seem to have forgotten mine. It’s ‘Dr. Quinzel,’ or ‘Doctor’ for short. Not ‘my dear’ or ‘sweetheart’ or ‘doll-face’ or any other little nicknames men use to undermine a woman’s professional standing in her place of business.”

The Joker stared at her. He was so used to dominating every room he was in, but she’d caught him off-guard with that one. It had wiped that smug smile right off his clown-face; Harleen felt pleased with herself although she kept her expression neutral.

“I hardly meant to offend, my d—my doctor,” the Joker said after a few seconds. “Please forgive me. I’m a creature of habit and old habits die hard.”

“I can see that,” Harleen said. “In fact, I’ve been wondering how long it will take for you to stop playing all your little games so we can finally get down to business.”

“And what business is that?” asked the Joker. “Delving into the mysteries of my mind? Finding out what makes me tick? Getting to the root of my problems?”

“Determining how you can get well,” Harleen said, just to see how he would react to the idea.

The Joker made a scornful noise. “And you said you were serious.”

“I am,” Harleen replied, wincing inwardly at how defensive she sounded.

“Oh, sure.” The Joker rolled his eyes. “Getting me well—that’s a joke I haven’t heard since Tut was still a prince. Wasn’t funny then; isn’t now.”

“I’m not like other doctors,” Harleen told him. “Your previous doctors may have decided you couldn’t be helped but I don’t give up so easily—”

“Who said anything about my previous doctors?” The Joker hooted laughter at the ceiling. “I don’t know if they wanted to cure me or kill me or send me to Mars, and I couldn’t care less.” He sat up on the edge of the bed and leaned forward. “And I don’t give a damn what you think, either. I can’t be helped. I can’t be adjusted or rehabilitated or salvaged or brainwashed or any other damned thing! I took a good, long look at myself and I saw the truth: There’s no hope for me—no chance, no possibility, no cure! None, nada, zero, zilch, the big goose egg!”

The Joker got to his feet and Harleen immediately did the same; he was taller than she was but he couldn’t loom over her quite as much when she was standing too. “You don’t give up? Well, good for you. Congratulations! You don’t have to—I’ve given up for you, Dr. Sweetheart, Dr. Doll- face. Get used to it—I have!”

Harleen drew herself up to her full height and looked into his grotesque, twisted-up features without flinching. “I see we’re not going to make any progress today,” she said in a quiet, unruffled tone, as if he hadn’t just been yelling. “I’ll be back when you’re less—this.” She turned on her heel and left.

Yelling incoherently, the Joker tried to follow her but the two husky orderlies who had been standing by in case of trouble caught him at the door. The yells became screams as they subdued him, and Harleen had to force herself not to look back in concern.

To her surprise, Dr. Leland was waiting for her in the hall. “Are you all right?” she asked.

Harleen nodded. “That actually went better than I thought it would,” she lied. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my office so I can write this up while it’s still fresh in my mind.”

* * *

Harleen expected that Dr. Leland would want to talk more about what had just happened, perhaps try to comfort her, even though she didn’t need comforting. She was afraid Dr. Leland would tell her the Joker’s reaction was too extreme and that she was withdrawing permission for Harleen to treat him.

But Dr. Leland didn’t knock on her door. Harleen heard her lock up her own office and leave for the night. All the other doctors were already gone except for Dr. Wendell, who was on call overnight. Harleen could work uninterrupted on her report, then make some notes about how to approach the next session.

How many sessions would it take, she wondered, before he stopped putting on a show? He’d said he was a creature of habit, which meant, among other things, he had to do everything he could to drive her away. Even after it became obvious that she wasn’t going to make it easy for him, he’d probably continue subjecting her to The Joker Show Starring The Joker simply because he no longer knew how to do anything else.

Harleen was still making notes when there was a polite tap-tap-tap at the door. She glanced at her watch as she got up to answer and saw she had stayed an hour later than she had intended.

It was one of the orderlies who had come into the Joker’s cell when she had left. His name-tag said Adam. “Sorry to bother you, Dr. Quinzel,” he said, his big face contrite, “but he insisted.”

“‘He?’” As if she really didn’t know.

“The subterranean homesick clown,” Adam said. “I mean, the Joker. He insisted I come and find you. He wants to apologize.”

Harleen’s eyebrows went up. “He’s awake again already?”

“He’s developed a high tolerance to sedatives,” the orderly said.

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask how the Joker could have known she was still here. She decided not to. “I’m just about to leave,” Harleen said pleasantly. “Tell the Joker I’ll see him at our next scheduled session.”

Adam grinned at her with approval. “Will do, Doc. You have a nice night.”

That would teach him, Harleen thought, as she closed the door.

* * *

She woke at four a.m. from a nightmare of finding the Joker had hanged himself in his cell with a rope made from his clothing.

Two orderlies, both of them Adam, cut him down. Dr. Leland stood beside Harleen, wringing her hands like a damsel in distress. When this gets out, the patients’ll riot. They’ll burn Arkham to the ground. She turned to Harleen. I have to tell Batman how the Joker wanted to apologize but you went home instead. He’ll be so mad. So mad.

Harleen took a sip of water from the glass on her nightstand and lay down to go back to sleep. But as soon as she did, she was back in the Joker’s cell, standing over his body with Dr. Leland moaning about Batman. She forced herself awake and padded into the kitchen to put on the coffee. Today was going to be a helluva long one.

* * *

“If you’re asking me whether you did the right thing,” Dr. Leland said, frowning, “I can tell you yes, absolutely, without a doubt, and I don’t know why you have to ask. The Joker has to understand that no, we do not come running every time he calls, not even when he wants to apologize for behaving badly.”

Harleen nodded. “That was my thinking at the time.”

“You think differently now?” Dr. Leland looked wary.

“As doctors, we are always in the power position,” Harleen said. “There’s a fine line between being appropriately assertive and bullying.”

Dr. Leland laughed a little. “I heard the whole thing from the hall. Someone did get bullied but—spoiler—it was you.”

“Not really,” Harleen said. “I didn’t let him bully me.”

“You’re splitting hairs,” Dr. Leland said. “But okay, have it your way. The Joker tried to bully you. We can’t allow that, either.”

“Still, he knew he’d done wrong and wanted to apologize.” Harleen sighed. “But I made him wait, and not just a few hours. I left him hanging all night.” She winced.

“Something wrong?” Dr. Leland looked concerned.

“No, just a poor choice of words,” Harleen said. “I was so annoyed. I wasn’t thinking of what was best for my patient. I only wanted to teach him a lesson.”

“Which happened to be the right thing anyway,” said Dr. Leland. “Sometimes we do the right thing even when our motives are less than pure. We’re only human.”

“But we have to rise above selfish considerations,” Harleen said.

“You can rise above next time,” Dr. Leland said, chuckling a little.

“Leaving something unresolved overnight is one of the worst things you can do,” Harleen said. “My parents never went to bed mad. Even during the times when my father was in—uh, was away, they never let anything fester between them. And never, ever overnight.”

Dr. Leland grimaced. “You aren’t your mother, the Joker’s not your father, and the doctor–patient relationship is in no way a marriage.”

“But it’s every bit as intimate,” Harleen replied. “Maybe more so. Patients tell therapists things they’d never tell their spouses. And the relationship is lopsided—we have all the power and personal information.”

“And thank God for that!” Now Dr. Leland looked alarmed. “Otherwise we’d all be doomed! The patients here are crazy but they aren’t stupid, and the Joker is positively diabolical. Never tell him anything about yourself, no matter how trivial you think it is. He might use it to ruin your life.”

Harleen frowned. “Nobody’s that good.”

“Narcissism and the need for immediate gratification tripped him up, not a failure of intellect,” Dr. Leland said. “I recommend you not see him for another six days—a week from yesterday’s debacle.”

“But that contravenes my whole program of concentrated therapy,” Harleen protested. “We’re supposed to have daily sessions. If I wait a whole week before seeing him, we’ll have to start all over from the beginning.”

“You’re still at the beginning,” said Dr. Leland. She put up one hand as Harleen started to say something else. “Never mind, I gave you the go-ahead and interfering before you’ve even started isn’t fair. That said, I wish you’d give it at least two or three days before your next session.”

“The point is that action, response, and reaction must be dealt with in the moment, as things happen,” Harleen said. “That’s why I shouldn’t have let him stew overnight. But it’s done now. I want to proceed with the program as outlined.”

“Five years ago, I’d never have gone along with this,” Dr. Leland said, her voice heavy with resignation. “I probably shouldn’t now. But I did, and I am, and I will. Just don’t see him until the end of the workday.”

“I didn’t plan to do otherwise,” Harleen lied. She had intended to go straight from Dr. Leland’s office to the Joker’s cell. Now she’d have to wait nine hours. Already she couldn’t stand it but she had to, and she couldn’t stand that, either. She hadn’t thought quickly enough to say she should see the Joker early in the day, while she was fresh. She’d have to rise above that next time, too, she supposed.

“I did promise I’d see the Joker on my own time, after all,” she added as she stood up. “I’ve got three patients to see before lunch and I don’t want to run late all day. So if you don’t mind—”

Dr. Leland made a shooing motion at her. “Go, go. Once more into the breach, walk tall, heal. You know the drill.”

“I know the drill,” Harleen said and left, stopping at her office to get her tablet and lock the door. She considered going down to the Joker’s cell anyway, but Dr. Leland would find out and hassle her about it. She sighed; no day was ever so hard that it couldn’t get harder.

Harleen made short, efficient work of her morning sessions. Not that she shortened them, exactly. But she had to face reality. Jake Maxwell, the paranoid schizophrenic, was decompensating again—the meds weren’t working and he was sure the government was conspiring with aliens to replace all non-human life on the planet, including fish, with robots. When Harleen asked why only non-humans, Maxwell had said, “Because it’s cheaper—no uniforms to buy.” It was probably the most sense Maxwell would make for a while.

Maxwell wasn’t usually violent but he had a way of inciting violence in others. One of the consulting psychiatrists had suggested Maxwell be tested for pheromones, but nothing in his file indicated any follow-up. Harleen made a note to write up an isolation order for him in advance. By the time isolation became necessary, Maxwell wouldn’t know where he was.

Her mass murderer, Gordy Sovay, claimed to hear voices just like Jane of Arc (“Most people think it’s Joan, but they’re wrong.”) They had told him how to get hold of an automatic weapon, and the Archangel Clansy (“He spelled it for me.”) had ordered him to take it into a crowded shopping mall.

To Harleen, he was one more sad case of mediocrity, and she was stuck listening to him tell her about the voices, which sounded like Twitter for unimaginative psycho killers.

Harleen broke for lunch after a session with the charitable serial killer. Stanley Stockwell preferred to be called a “serpent of mercy.” He had volunteered at care facilities for the elderly where he had gently dispatched those diagnosed with dementia. He might have gotten away with this indefinitely if he hadn’t decided to expand his victim pool to include any older person who had moments of confusion or forgetfulness.

A disorganized resident at one of the care homes who had almost drunk a cup of poisoned coffee had been his undoing. Stanley’s total lack of remorse had sent him to Arkham. In a just universe, Harleen thought, the man would develop Alzheimer’s himself. So far, however, he was just stultifyingly bland; it made Harleen want to slap him. When she had gone into psychiatry, she’d had no idea just how many psychotics were just plain boring. Hannah Arendt sure had been right about the banality of evil.

Harleen ate lunch alone in her office so she could think about her evening session with the Joker. He was so unpredictable; she never really knew what was going to happen or what he’d do. It could be scary but it was also challenging. Not to mention exciting.

Unlike her afternoon appointments, who were as predictable as wind-up toys. Her other serial killer, Durwood LeBlanc, became so rude and confrontational that she had to have the orderlies take him to a quiet room. No surprise—he’d been building up to it. Durwood always said the same old things—same old profanities, same old insults, same old accusations and threats. She might as well have been a wind-up toy, Harleen thought, for all the difference she made to him.

Her last two patients barely kept her awake, even with extra cups of strong coffee. Well, yes, she had gotten up obscenely early but Harleen had dealt with sleep deprivation as an intern and she knew the difference between physical fatigue and excruciating boredom. Boredom was tougher. But she did her job, listened to them tell her things they had told her numberless times before, made the right I’m-listening noises, and got away from them as fast as she could without breaking into a run.

Since it was one of those days when all the doctors were in, Dr. Leland had called a staff meeting for that afternoon. It wasn’t quite as boring as her patients but it seemed to last forever, and she could barely hide her impatience. As always, she took notes, if for no other reason than to keep her mind from wandering too much. But when she got back to her office afterward she discovered all her notes had been about the Joker:

Get to real cause of anger. More than frustration with confinement—how much more? Origin of persona—Card games?—Parent with gambling problem? Or sideshow/freak fixation? And what IS his real name?

That was the truly astonishing thing about him—of every wild-and-crazy, larger-than-life, multicolor criminal that had ever made a splash in Gotham City, only the Joker had managed to conceal his identity completely, including his given name. It was as if he had just sprung up out of nowhere, coming into existence simply because he’d felt like it. No one had ever known him as anything but the Joker.

Everyone came from somewhere. But Harleen thought if anyone could have magicked himself into existence by sheer force of will, it was this clown.

There was one more hour left in the workday after the staff meeting. Harleen used it to write reports, make corrections, reread patient files. Then she finally gave up and reorganized her Joker materials in the special ring-binder devoted exclusively to her most challenging patient. There wasn’t much in it yet besides photocopies of newspaper articles and her private preliminary notes.

Dr. Leland asked the staff to digitize their notes for easy access from the Arkham cloud. But Harleen always kept hardcopy backups. Any cloud could be hacked, and if a hacker altered or erased data, the original was gone for good—unless it existed as something other than bits or bytes. There were off-line archives but Harleen had been through enough computer meltdowns to know there was no such thing as too many backups.

Harleen also felt it was wise not to put everything in the cloud. Her private notes on her patients were just that—private—and they couldn’t be archived because they were dynamic, changing as she learned more. She had a feeling her private notes on the Joker would be extremely dynamic.

Harleen’s desire to go down to the Joker’s cell was so strong now she thought it must have been radiating from her like heat. She half-expected Dr. Leland to suddenly barge in and say she had decided to cancel the proposed treatment plan because she thought Harleen was too personally invested and who did she think she was anyway, Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung? Arkham Asylum wasn’t a place for breakthroughs; it was a storage facility for people too toxic for a standard human warehouse. People like the Joker had to be handled like the hazardous materials they were.

She heard Dr. Leland lock up for the night, then walk past without stopping. Still, Harleen made herself sit at her desk until she heard Dr. Leland’s car leave the parking lot. Then she picked up her tablet and her ring-binder and walked sedately through Arkham down to the Joker’s cell in the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement, taking the stairs instead of the elevator.