VI: a grin without a cat

Dear Vincent, the letter read, in his wife's exquisite cursive.

Do you remember the day we swam in that little spring? Climbed up the face of the rock, and jumped together, how alive we felt under the water. So cold but warm too. I still don't know how I found your hand.

HahahaAHHHA

HAhAHAHa

HAHAh

AHAHAH

AHAHhAHAH

Underneath, in what appeared to be red lipstick, were haha's, smeared into the page. He had begun breaking out in hives, the backs of his arms horrible mountain ranges. The biographer thought of Killer Croc, felt the irregularity of his own skin, and shuddered. The letters came now nearly everyday with no return address, each one bearing a remembered intimacy rendered into a cruel joke. He spent the days on his laptop, poring over old newspaper clips of Batman. He was placated by a single thought — that it must be one of his enemies, doing this. By working his way through, by committing his hard labor, he'd eventually find the perpetrator. And then an old police connection had come through—he got the address he was looking for. A small apartment above a defunct tea shop.

He had bought a gun. Did parole officers carry guns? He'd never really dealt with them, the minor leaguers of the justice system. The gophers. Maybe it was better he had one, anyway. He wasn't concerned about his own safety, so much, he realized, as he was excited by the prospect of a firefight, of the roulette, of maybe being hit, of it all ending. He jerked himself to attention and buzzed.

"Who is it?" came a rather high-pitched voice.

"Ronald Fleming," (he mumbled through the name). "Your new parole officer."

He walked through the foyer and climbed the staircase to the second floor. The door was already opened, a man in a full suit and a top hat standing there, drinking tea, his eyebrows raised. If the biographer hadn't known better, he would've mistaken the man for the owner of the tea shop, pockets possibly full of crumpets and scones.

"Evening, Jervis," he said, as they took a seat around a slender table. The apartment was very small, just a room really. The bed was oddly close to the kitchen appliances — for a moment the biographer wondered if Tetch was recreating his cell in Arkham, the scale of it, a tiny thing, so used to the cramped conditions he'd developed a kind of inverse claustrophobia, a need to be in smaller spaces.

Tetch didn't challenge the biographer's identity, known for his manners, for polished surfaces and the many elegances of convention. He only pulled on the string of his tea bag, up and then back down, saying nothing, deferential and businesslike, letting the visitor dictate the terms of the encounter. The biographer began with the basics, as though going through a procedure —was it true that Tetch had been out almost eight months now? It was. He hadn't missed a single meeting with the previous parole officer? He hadn't.

"Impressive," said the biographer, conforming to his new role, pleased to be someone else, if just for a while.

He was working for a man downstairs? The owner of the halfway house, who, luck had it, ran a hat shop. He had become a hat salesman?

"A kindness, to have placed me here," Tetch said. "To be among my hats. And so near to the tea!"

The mention of hats had cracked open Jervis Tetch just a bit, the biographer noted. He couldn't quite help himself, it seemed, explaining where the term the Mad Hatter came from. In older times, mercury was used in the production of hats, said Tetch, so when people wore them, the mercury slowly leaked down through the felt, slithered into the brain. Drove them crazy. Mad.

Tetch laughed loudly to show how conscious he was of all this, to prove to his parole officer that he had evolved, had reached insight, or to maybe relocate the idea of a mad hatter hundreds of years before — or so thought the biographer. He had been burying himself in psychological texts, anything to understand these lunatics.

But he had to admit the man had a certain charm.

"I call it wartime, to people who don't know. The wartime years," Tetch said. "They think I'm talking about Iraq, or some British war they maybe don't know about. Because I do need to talk about it. The horror of it. I had to do terrible things, you know, in the trenches, as it were. I freely admit it. And I paid for it, did my time. Then sometimes they ask for specifics and I digress, too painful to talk about. And it is. I don't know. I'm sure you can imagine how confusing it all is. How do you get over that — overcome it—what you've done?"

The biographer was lost in a reverie, found himself relating, found himself accepting tea from this man Tetch. The problem was that his own war was raging too. He was in the middle of it right now, and it just did not seem very likely he would survive. He barely even noticed how difficult it was for Tetch to reach another cup from his shelf, how his arm seemed stiff and dead.

"Of course, we don't completely change, we still keep the old shells of our old selves. You can see I still feel most comfortable in this attire," Tetch gestured to the suit and hat. "I try not to quote Wonderland much anymore, and yet, the occasion clearly calls for it, so please permit me this one indulgence: "It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."

The biographer felt warmed by the tea, and felt a desire to share. Why not? He had no one to talk to anymore. A conversation between two men. We all have our wars, he thought. You have yours and I have mine. He'd been drunk when he'd arrived, so repulsed by the hives, so paralyzed by the relentless anxiety, unable to endure.

"Been down the rabbit hole, myself, lately," he told Tetch.

"That right?" The Englishman looked a little concerned, like his charm had worked too well.

And just then the drunk biographer's clumsy fingers were no match for the dainty preparation of the cup and saucer, and he managed to drop them, shattering the porcelain into pieces. He felt terrible for intruding on this man, a fellow war veteran, a man who was trying to rebuild his life with his silly hats, who was finally on the straight and narrow. He began picking up the shards, didn't even feel anything when one sliced his finger — and then he heard it, and when he did, it broke his heart.

"Honey, what's wrong?" called a young woman's voice. A panel of the wall slid open, a bookshelf full of Through The Looking Glass and other works by Lewis Carroll.

She was young, maybe still a teenager, the biographer could see right away, with long, flowing blonde hair. It was unmistakable — she was wearing the light blue dress, the apron-like white cloth, and of course, there it was, almost carelessly adrift in her hair, the playing card for which Tetch was most known, the artifact of his great technological genius.

It was enough to sober the biographer at once. The Alice figure seemed to know she had done wrong.

"Jervis?" she kept repeating, like a frightened child.

"You found another Alice?" the biographer asked slowly.

"If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does," came the cryptic response.

"What have you done to this poor girl?"

He wondered if Kati was being warped as well, thinking that she was somewhere this very second, somewhere terrible and dark and unknown.

Tetch explained, right in front of her, that she had been miserable, a wretch, and he had found her, had saved her from a terrible lonely fate, and look how happy she was, just look.

Alice smiled, right on cue.

"She was a heroin addict, near-death. I saved her, pulled her out of the alley. I saw her one day, and I thought, with a little help, we'll both be the better for it. You don't believe me? Alice, show him your arms. Show him the track marks."

The girl rolled over her wrists, still smiling. Seeing her so under his spell, a mere puppet at his behest, snapped something in the biographer.

"And what about your last Alice, the one before her? Did she do meth?"

The Mad Hatter bristled, opening a drawer and taking out a butcher knife, holding it in a low and awkward position.

"My dear," he said to Alice forlornly, "here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that," he said.

The biographer calmly took out his gun. He had never fired one before.

"Tell me everything you know about the Batman and maybe I'll let you live," he said.

Tetch paced around, manically, not even questioning the strangeness of the question as he began speaking of the great meddler, the ruiner of his dreams. He began to weep uncontrollably, clutched his own arms. Alice ran over to his side, caressing them.

"He would beat me. For sport. I am not the strongest man and so he toyed with me. I told him about Alice when he asked, told him where I found her, in an alley. I'd surrendered by then, and he still broke both of my arms. He pulled them behind my shoulders until they snapped. Have you ever heard a bone break? When I mentioned finding her there, he went berserk."

He paused, hopefully.

"I don't suppose you'll let me go? Please. We have such a wonderful world here."

He let his hand run through Alice's hair and that just about did it. The biographer shot Tetch in the face, right under his cheekbone.

He couldn't free Kati, but maybe he could free Alice. He could do something. The effect didn't seem to have worn off, though. She twirled around in circles, moving to invisible music as her lover lay on the floor. She stepped over his body and walked over to the biographer. She leaned in very close and whispered in his ear: "If you don't know where you are going, any road can take you there."

GOTHAM HERALD: Hatter Tossed in Bin

Jervis Tetch, once known as The Mad Hatter, has died at age 52. The circumstances of his death are unknown, but he was found murdered in his apartment. He had hypnotized at least three known individuals with his mind-control playing cards, including the owner of a local hat shop. Another victim, a young girl, is still recovering at a clinic for the mentally ill. Her condition is being described as a "waking coma." According to Tetch's will, he asked to have his ashes scattered nearby the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Gotham Park. City officials did not respond when the Herald called for a comment, but a source told the paper that "we don't honor the last wishes of lunatics. If I had my way, his body would be sent down to the fun bin at Gotham Hospital. Students can practice performing nose jobs on Mr. Tetch."