JMJ

Chapter Two

He hadn't Finished His Tea

"Who is he…" said Jervis slowly— lethargically, as he started his second cup of tea; the caffeine seemed to wake him a little, though he was still heavily drugged. "That being Gotham used to know… 'Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow… Who seemed distracted with his woe, Who rocked his body to and fro, And muttering mumblingly and low, As though his mouth was full of dough…'."

He stared down at his tea then. He did not feel like speaking anymore.

This was the fifth day Dr. Leland had visited him. She managed to get him to eat some soda crackers and soup as well as drink his tea. He even took it with some sugar again. The drugs had been lessened, but he remained heavily melancholic and moody. Nor did he eat or drink without Leland watching him. She had to push even to do that much.

"Who is this person Gotham used to know?" asked Leland gently; she was not going to assume he was speaking of himself just yet however much the description fit Tetch well enough.

Jervis knew this too as he lifted his gentle brow. The sound of the skeleton of Arkham groaning in the wind was accompanied by the sound of swaying distant trees and of crows passing overhead beyond the drafty window. He blinked up at the ceiling light and then sighed heavily. The solid sounds of the world around him were strange but not altogether unpleasant. They hid the tension. They hid the silence, and he listened, thinking of some deep but gentle forest path far, far away…

"Hmm…" he mused; he remembered his tea enough to finger for it. After groping absently a moment or two, he found the handle and brought the cup to his lips.

"Jervis?" asked Leland.

"'What's the use of their having names if they won't answer to them…'" muttered Jervis.

He was finding himself repeating lines more than he ought to, more than he meant to, but it was all that came to mind. Perhaps it was a defense mechanism. That must be it.

He shrugged and went on with it then, "'No use to them… but it's useful to the people who name them… if not, why do things have names at all…?'"

"Would you like to be alone?"

Jervis blinked again and stiffened. A shudder went up his spine faster than his sluggish attitude liked, but perhaps the caffeine was working through his system enough to arouse sharper movement and thought again. Perhaps, the depressive state was wearing off… No, he knew it was. He could feel it, and for the first time in his life he begrudged it. The slow miserable hibernation, despite how painful it was, despite how heavily despair bore down upon him, it was a shield against the Arkham staff. Although just yesterday he would have given anything to feel better, he felt himself clinging to his misery like a wet blanket now.

Someone's echoing sob sounded almost like part of the wind somewhere from deep within the asylum as Dr. Leland waited patiently for Jervis' response. He knew her words to be no idle threat. A doctor did not speak with a patient that was not willing to speak, but though he was not sure he was willing to speak anymore than in his cryptic manner (or his mind kept interrupting his own thoughts for speech with those of Carroll's work) he was not willing to be alone.

He bit his lip.

"'Speak, can't you?'" he nearly whispered, and louder he said quickly, almost desperately with a gasp as though he was nearly choking on something he was eating, " 'They're getting on very well!'" He almost spilled his tea.

"Who is getting on well?"

Jervis gulped, recovering himself a little after a deep breath. He took a shaky sip from his tea cup and then he put it down.

He said more to himself than to her, "… 'What is his sorrow'…'This here young lady… she wants for to know your history…" He cleared his throat from its sob and then he began, "'We went to school in the same sea…took the regular courses…reeling and writhing…then the different branches of arithmetic— Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision…there was Mystery: ancient and modern… Ten hours at first, nine the next, and so on'…and on and so on and so on…so on…'" He stopped. "How was prison, dear child…" he then sighed softly. "How was prison, dear child…"

Leland paused a moment and then ventured to ask, very much like Alice herself trying to understand the queer manner of the citizens of Wonderland, Jervis could not help but notice, "How was prison, Jervis?" She was attempting to speak it like such a child in the world of grownups from another land— another land that was only a thinly veiled parallel— a comedy and yet so very much an analogy of the world humans are born in.

He had to commend her for it, and he bowed gentlemanly as could be while still being seated. Even still all he uttered was, "I haven't quite finished my tea."

"But the Mad Hatter never finishes his tea," Leland remarked.

Jervis wondered if she had been reading the book herself for research or if she only just recalled that famous tidbit about the Hatter.

"Quite so, quite so…" admitted Jervis not realizing at first that he had not spoken a quote at all or even a elusion to one. He shrugged and went on with it then as he finished his own thought unhindered by quotations of another's work, "Dr. Leland, and it will take so much longer alone now… alone."

He watched the gears gently turn above her head, and the considerations of how to proceed were like little pixies whispering to one another along the headband she wore to keep back her short black hair. It was fleeting; she was an expert psychiatrist, after all, and she could not look distracted for long.

She was smart enough to know he had not been speaking about school, but Jervis was not the first inmate to compare Arkham to a high school of lunatics. It might have been the Riddler who started that one. Besides, to mention the courses of "Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision" would make sense in Arkham High. That was not what she was debating about, though. It was possible she had known all along what Jervis' problem was. In fact, the clearer Jervis' head became the more he had no doubt, but he let her decide how best to approach him now. Despite himself, when she spoke, the bluntness and nakedness of her words struck him like a slap in the face. Despite her calm and gentle tone and that fact that he was the one who started the word "alone", he shuddered.

"Does any of this have to do with being alone at Arkham?"

It was so casually spoken that at first Jervis had to pause to comprehend what she said as though she had spoken in a language only half-known to the listener. He heard "Arkham" easily enough, but it was the other words that despite their being English by themselves did not quite fit together orderly until he paused to sort them out into the question Leland had posed.

He did not realize until he had sorted it out, either, how his jaw was parted and how he stared so glazed without blinking. He blinked then, several times and rather sleepily, and shut his mouth like a trap and gulped.

"It's hard to be in a place like this alone," said Leland just as before, balanced so perfectly between calmness, gentleness, and firmness so that it did not quite sound like babying. Certainly the purposeful speech of psychiatrists trying not to upset the delicate imbalances of a patient sounded almost more demeaning than speaking "kitty cat talk", but Leland managed it in a way that was not too irritating. Often she spoke so naturally it almost did not sound like psychiatrist talk as with what she added in a most conversational tone, "Without anyone other than doctors and staff."

Jervis dropped his head.

"Yes."

Then he cleared his throat again, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. "I mean, well, I…" His voice faltered with a strange squeak and his fingers stopped. Very softly he added, "Things have been different lately…not that anyone wants to be here at all."

"You could work towards recovery again," suggested Leland without emotion but simply as a matter of fact. "It says in your records that you have tried before with a little success even if it wasn't followed through."

Jervis thought a moment. Anger built up inside of him as he thought resentfully of the few times he had tried to change. He had tried to get better when the pain was too much, but the pain had always hurt before he was a "Batman Rogue". His escape to Wonderland was all that he had.

He knew he had ruined it himself with thoughts of murder and hatred and blood. He had always hated when other people had soiled the works of Carroll with modern Goth ideas in everything from video games, to comics, to concert themes with teenager girls dressed in distressed Alice-inspired Lolita. Yet had he done much better? Had he ruined it more than them all? His alias as a Gotham criminal and madman certainly made them all whisper in Gothic thrill in London classrooms. Dark, morbid Wonderland… not the joy that his mother had found in it. It was not even the humor in the mocking of Victorian society.

So it certainly was not the games his mother would play with Meryl and eventually shared with little Jervis. Meryl was Alice and Mother was the White Rabbit or the Queen of Hearts or the White or Red Queens. Cocoa (when she wasn't busy napping or stalking stockings) would stand for the Cheshire Cat, and everyone took speaking for her as she did the actions. Jervis was always the Hatter. It made the position even more coveted when he knew Bertie used to play the Hatter's part when Jervis was too small. Meryl liked Jervis playing him better, anyway. Although Bertie sometimes played the Knave or the Gryphon, he eventually said he was too old for such games and believed Caleb about football and rugby instead. Jervis knew that he only envied the position of being the best male character in the story, which had been handed down to Jervis like a hand-me-down sweater that everyone coveted rather than hated and was now too small for Bertie.

He mimicked the Hatter as well as a small child can. His sister laughed and made him beam as he propped about his favorite Velveteen Rabbit as the March Hare with a bowtie that mother sewed on for him. An oversized costume party hat was always being lifted above Jervis' brow, and he would laugh too.

Jervis squeezed his eyes shut.

No!

A dead past.

A beaten, dead past.

Long lost.

Perhaps it was almost better that his Wonderland was now a living nightmare. He was only playing with dead bones anyway. Dead bones of a lost past, never to be found again. When he first rediscovered the joy of these books it was truly "Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers Plucked in a far-off land". Now, it was a wreath of locusts sucking on the guts of bloated dead flowers watered as if they were alive but turned instead into something worse than a relic left to turn pristine with drying age like pressed flowers between crisp pages. A rotting corpse of vegetative flesh like one of Poison Ivy's Venus fly traps dead from a baterang, and now the flies were gorging upon it.

"Shan't!" he whispered. "Shan't!"

"What is it, Jervis?" asked Dr. Leland.

Jervis held the sides of his head as though trying to pull an invisible hat over his eyes, but he did not answer.

"Jervis?" asked Dr. Leland with care again after some moments of the patient half-sobbing and full-moaning.

"I can't go on, Dr. Leland," said Jervis timidly, painfully even; he choked on a sob. "It hurts too much…Wonderland is dead…It has been for many long years…I'm trapped inside…I…I…I can't speak with you…I can't…I shan't speak to anyone until I've spoken with Pr. Crane."

Why had he said that?

He was not sure himself, and it did not seem to make Dr. Leland happy despite how she kept her cool.

"Pr. Crane no longer lives in Gotham, and it may be difficult for him to wish to return, especially so early after his release."

She had no need to expound upon the fact that Crane's last visit to Gotham had been to speak to Dr. Bartholomew at a mental clinic away from Arkham. A clinic none of the Rogue inmates had ever seen the inside of before Harleen Quinzel's release from the asylum. What Jervis did not know was where Crane lived now. Perhaps if he had he might have thought about escaping again to see him himself, but why did he want to see him? Jervis shook his head and dropped it into his arms miserably after a nasty sip of lukewarm tea.

"Pr. Crane," insisted Jervis despite himself. "Please, Dr. Leland. His therapy was granted, after all."

Leland paused knowing exactly what he was referring to since she herself had allowed the therapy of Harley visiting with Jonathan. Slowly and calmly, she answered, "I cannot promise you a visit from Pr. Crane."

His resolve was made and his position clear. He gave no answer.

"I can ask him, but he may not want to, and for his own sake, I will not press him. If you are serious, we could call your family again instead. Your brother Bertram has expressed a desire to help if you want it."

Jervis felt ill hearing that name. Bertie did not understand. He never had. Jervis coiled within himself like a snail to hear even a hint of a memory of home in his waking ears, besides.

"But you have to work with us first," said Leland. Now she spoke to him like a police officer to a high school student who had done something very gravely wrong and that it would be dangerous to his future if he did it again. "You've made it difficult for yourself faking recovery once before, and taking over the asylum with your microchips more than once. We cannot allow too much leeway to do anything that will provide you with an opportunity to compromise the asylum again. Do you understand me?"

His eyes were already squeezed shut. He shook a little with face still in his arms; he did not move.

"Jervis?" asked Dr. Leland once more.

"I'm a poor man," he moaned weakly to himself not to Leland; though he had a feeling that she was not fooled by his display of weakness and tired sluggishness just as shrewdly as the Queen of Hearts knew that she recognized the Hatter as the singer that had ruined her concert. "A poor, poor man. 'I hadn't just begun my tea—not above a week or so—and what with the bread and butter getting so thin—and the twinkling of the tea…most things twinkled after that…I'd rather finish my tea'…Oh…" He began to sob.

"You're not being put on trial," said Leland sternly. "If you want my help to escape the pain you are feeling, I will do what I can, but it is up to you to decide to cooperate with me."

Jervis sighed and began to rock back and forth looking more sluggish than before, and he began to mumble to himself,

"Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Agreed to have a battle;

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

As black as a tar barrel;

Which frightened both the heroes so,

They quite forgot their quarrel…"

There was no real reason this time for why he was repeating what he was repeating, except maybe to express the feeling of the uselessness of Leland continuing to argue with him about it. Or maybe because he had often thought of Batman as the monstrous crow as black as a tar barrel. Maybe it was because he was already arguing with Pr. Crane in his fancy at his house where Crane would be furious to see him.

He had made up his mind. They would never get Crane, anyway. Not now. What did it matter?

What did anything matter, really?

He took his lukewarm cup of tea and poured it on his head before Dr. Leland could stop him.

#

Sometimes was Jonathan afraid that his new life was not real? Or that it was too good to last? Sometimes, admittedly.

He had not attempted to use his degree yet. Harley kept urging him to, but he could not. Not just yet. No teaching. No authority, no lectures, no tests. Not yet. But it was through her again that he had been urged enough to see if he could not get a job at the small-town university's library instead. Without a library science degree he had had little confidence in that. He did not try as hard as he might have with his résumé. Sometimes he wondered if that subsequently got him the job. Getting hired was getting stranger by the year, he had come to realize after being out of it for several years.

At first he could not help the feeling of intimidation, though who he was intimidated by he was not sure particularly. After all, as the new reference librarian, he was pretty much left to himself. He did his job well in both cataloguing and helping students and other patrons utilize the facility.

But most of the time, he could lose himself there now. The quietude, the smell of the books, the antiques, the stain glass windows. There were the metalwork railings of the second storey-shelving like a smaller version of Ithaca's Cornell University, the perfect niches where the more fanciful-minded sat and read, the busts of Shakespeare, Aristotle, and Beethoven. Even those students only pretending to read or to study were usually respectfully quiet of those who wished to study. Jonathan Crane sat behind his beautiful wooden desk with a classic library lamp as he adjusted computer catalogues, read through references, or even just read from a book, which was the most pleasant thing of all. He found pleasure in shelving books when there were not enough work-study pages to do so. He rarely checked people out at the circulation desk, though he preferred to help people find material and often more than they needed.

At a library, though, being extra helpful rather than not helpful enough was tolerable. Some of the more studious sort of students were even beginning to like him, which made him feel all the stranger. He was not used to being liked by anyone other than his wife.

Actually, the most pleasant thing of all was that no one knew him as anything other than the new reference librarian, except those one or two who legally needed to know in a few high-up places in the university, but they kept it quiet. There was no need to stir up the university about it.

That was fine. How wonderfully fine. "Fine" was definitely the word, actually. Perhaps the word described his entire life at the moment, and he was quite content with that.

He sipped at his thermos of nice hot black tea and took a slow easy breath quite contentedly. He glanced at the quiet modern clock made to look like an antique lantern-style upon the scholarly green wall across from his desk. It was time to leave. Between the shelves to his left, he could just barely see the head librarian cleaning up shop at the front desk.

With a pleasant smile, he cleaned up his desk and realized with surprise how much tea he had left. He had been so content with his work that he had forgotten about his second round of it he had made right after lunch. He stood up from the swivel chair, and went back for his jacket. Then he took his leisure crossing the library's main floor from which hung the original light fixtures between the naked second storey of shelves. He basked in the scholarly and thoughtful aura beneath the high domed ceiling and tiny skylight slits.

To think that only a year or so ago, his love for libraries had been nearly buried— at least in the sense that he would have preferred its inhabitants screaming rather than reading no matter how much he lied to himself about cherishing such establishments as this. At that time, he had not seemed to think anyone even deserved the richness of culture and literature aside from himself despite hating people for not appreciating it.

He tried not to let thinking of the past disturb him too much, because, certainly, all his life he could have never pictured his happiness now. He would not have called it perfect. He was realistic in the sense that perfection was not humanly possible, but it was as pleasant a life that this world could offer, and he had gone through misery and hatred and madness long enough to appreciate it more than he ever would have without such a past. For that, he was most grateful. Yes, grateful. Not for his past itself, but because he had overcome it and now could appreciate the simplicity of life in a way that so many people took for granted.

"Goodbye, Jonathan," said the head librarian with a wave.

"Miss Vahl," said Jonathan with a happy nod.

He could have used a car, but he liked the walk home. The spring wind blew his loose jacket and scarf just like in the old days "bagging and fluttering" about his odd lank form, but he found it ironic and almost amusing that he probably looked more like the "genius of famine" than he ever had before. Not in the literal sense as in his dark, brooding days before the Scarecrow, but in the sense of the actual appearance of the infamous schoolmaster of American literature known as Ichabod Crane, because this time he had nearly discovered that bounce to go with it. Not that Jonathan's personality allowed much for bouncing— that was Harley's department— but his happy face and his positive continence made up for the melancholic walking pattern.

The fact that one of the students wished him farewell made him feel the humor of the comparison all the more.