Chapter Nine

All the good in the world
You can put inside a thimble
And still have room for you and me
-Tom Waits, Misery is the River of the World

It wasn't as simple as just walking away from him. It would never be that simple, not where the Joker was involved.

If I was just being manipulated, then why did everything he say ring so true? Why did everything he pointed out to me become suddenly obvious? Why was I unable to see the world as it was before?

He doesn't have to lie. All he has to do is tell the truth—but if what he's saying is true, then how is he manipulating me?

Is he manipulating me?

Or is he just trying to show me what he sees? Is this his method of unburdening himself? Does he need me to see the world the way he does in order for me to understand why he does the things he does?

But no. He doesn't act out of any misguided sense of obligation towards the human race and he doesn't give a shit about the greater good; he made that perfectly clear. He doesn't act out of any motive that I can see. So what? What?

I couldn't focus on anything, so I didn't argue when Stratford quietly sent me home an hour later.

Once I reached my apartment, I found myself struck with a craving for coffee. I decided against it. I didn't need to be any jitterier than I already was. I brewed some chamomile instead, and went to the bathroom to take down my hair and wash off the day's makeup. That done, I leaned against the counter and stared at myself in the mirror.

I had always had the type of face and body that was described as "cute", a stigma I had been ungratefully trying to escape since my teens. To me, the adjectives "beautiful" or "stunning" were much more desirable—but my nose was too snub to be called beautiful, my face too heart-shaped. I was too short and too curvy to be called stunning—one had to be willowy, to have long legs for that. Pam was stunning. Not me.

He called me beautiful.

The thought arose unbidden, and I glared into the mirror, angered by that weak part of me that insisted on being flattered. Then again, I doubted that his idea of beauty was conventional, so maybe I should have felt insulted instead… but I didn't.

The most disturbing thing about it was that I was beginning to find him beautiful, too. The knotted scars splayed across the face, the burning eyes, the matted green hair… the hands, rough and long-fingered and dangerous. The solid lips, untouched by the scars spread over the rest of his face, soft in appearance. I was even beginning to find beauty in the stained teeth.

And this new admiration for him physically was just a reflection of how I'd felt about his mind for a month now. It was unique, it was interesting, and that made it beautiful.

I stared at the mirror and suddenly resolved to try once more to get inside of his head. This time, I wouldn't be trying amidst the distracting environment that was the asylum and I wouldn't have a ferociously dangerous patient across the table from me requiring at least half of my attention and quick responses. I was determined to piece together what he had told me so far to reach some sort of understanding, to make sense of it all, because I knew I would not rest until I had.

I went into the kitchen, removed the kettle from the stove, and then returned to my room, shut off the lights, and locked the door. In the twilight coming in from the shaded window, I sat on the bed, and I set my mind free to wander and puzzle out this problem.

The Joker was either manipulating me for some reason of his own—probably for the sake of escape—or he was trying to show me the truth. I somehow doubted he needed my help escaping (an event that I imagined was looming over us all). So, assuming it was the latter, what truth was he trying to show me?

Evil. Good. Were these universal concepts? Cultural? If there was no universal definition of good and evil, if it was always circumstantial, then how could any one person be good or evil?

I took the Batman as an example. A year ago, public opinion was all for him bludgeoning criminals and leaving them for the police. He was good. He saved the city. Lately, though, he'd been showing a deadly vigilance, a lack of understanding of the humanity he was supposedly defending. Take his treatment of Jonathan. He was legally insane, but Batman beat him more badly every time before sending him back to Arkham, sometimes confining him to the infirmary for weeks, and that was to say nothing of the nightmares that followed.

Batman meant well, but was he achieving his intentions?

In contrast, I took the Joker. There were no rules that he followed. As a result, he had a peculiar sort of freedom that I had never seen before.

Authority? What was that? He did what he wanted to do, precisely when he wanted to do it. He seemed to look at his incarceration at Arkham as a temporary setback, if he even gave it that much thought—he seemed to be working plenty of mischief within its walls.

He thought differently, and as a result, freely. He recognized his ability to do anything that was physically or mentally possible without taking into account the social constraints and conditioning placed upon the world as a whole. He felt no need to just get along and make everything work. The question was this: was there room for a person like him in any society?

Well, if the whole population was like him, then the human race would likely die out very quickly. However, as an individual…

On his own, there might be some merit to his approach.

It didn't look that way on the surface, to be sure. He killed. He stole. He destroyed. He bled anarchy, reeked of it. How could that have any benefit?

Not insignificantly, it had the effect of inspiring people. People looked at him and were horrified. They saw wickedness and were disgusted by it. How much more, then, would they want to distance themselves from the Joker's assumed evil by fighting against it?

People saw him, saw how easily he took a life, and valued their own lives more, knowing how delicate those lives were. When people were forced to view their own mortality, they lived more powerfully.

This, at least, was the human result after one got past that paralyzing, blinding stage of abject terror that the Joker typically inspired. If he had become old news, if he hadn't gotten caught, then they would have accepted his evil and settled down to combat it, each in their own way.

My eyes, which had drifted shut, slowly opened.

He had a purpose. His supposed wickedness had a purpose. There was no white without black, and there was no good without evil. Throughout the course of history, not a good deed was accomplished that hadn't been inspired by some hardship or cruelty, and without people to represent that cruelty…

The Joker had carved out his own purpose, and I saw it now. He was the black to other people's white. He showed people that life could be ugly, a truth that everyone needed to face and fight against sooner or later. I doubted that he did this out of a true sense of altruism, but the result was the same regardless of his intentions.

I blinked. I think I had finally seen what I was supposed to.

The next morning, Pam was due to depart for Egypt. I had maneuvered to work the night shift at Arkham so that I could see her off. I had been exhausted the night before and slept well despite my troubled mind, so when I rolled out of bed at seven, I felt rested. I climbed in my car and drove over to her place.

My knock went unanswered. No one left their doors unlocked in this city and you'd have to be crazy to have a hide-a-key anywhere not on your person, so I was left knocking harder and then harder. "Okay, okay! Jeez," Pam snapped, flinging the door open finally. She looked frazzled. "You don't have to be so annoying about—shit, Harley, what happened to you?"

My hand went immediately to my hair, which felt normal enough. "What?!"

"You've got… like…" She gestured at her eyes fruitlessly before shaking her head, muttering, "Never mind, I'm just crazy. Come help me."

I stole a look at her mirror as I followed her past. I couldn't immediately see what she meant, but after the first half-second, I realized. The difference was in my eyes. I couldn't nail down exactly how I knew this, and I was sure it wasn't a change in makeup—there was just something different about them. I would have liked to stop and stare and figure out exactly what was going on there, but Pam rushed me forward.

"There's going to be this semi-formal thing…" Pam said apologetically as we stepped into the bedroom. I gaped. There were clothes spread everywhere—I had no idea how she managed to fit them all into her compact little closet, or, more importantly, how she was going to get them back in.

"Harl? What do you think?" she asked anxiously, and I looked over. She was holding out two cocktail dresses side-by-side, both smartly-cut, not too high or too low anywhere, one black, one green.

I didn't have to deliberate for long. "Green."

"Are you sure? I think I wear too much green," she said doubtfully, looking at the standup mirror set up in the corner of her room and holding the black dress against her front.

"Yeah, well, you've got a good reason," I said, reaching over to take the green. "See this color?"

"Mm-hmm," she said, eyes skipping over the deep emerald hue of the dress patiently.

I put it up to her shoulder. "When you wear it, your eyes change. They match that shade exactly." I looked around at the massive selection of clothes and grabbed an olive green tank top, shaking it at her. "And the same thing happens when you put that on. Green makes your eyes change color, and need I remind you that green eyes are dying out."

"But black is so classy."

"Black is sexy," I corrected her. "Unless you're planning to spend the trip seducing Dr. Woodrue—"

She jerked the green dress away from me. "Ugh, Harley, fine. If it'll make you stop making insinuations that might actually make me sick, I'll take the green."

I smirked, and she hung it neatly in her garment bag and zipped it up. "All right. I'm all packed." She blew her bangs out of her eyes and looked around. "This place is a mess," she mumbled, and swiftly crossed the room, beginning to jam clothes into a dresser drawer. I stared, wide-eyed, until she tried to add a dress that definitely needed to be hanging up in the closet, and then I bounded across the room and grabbed it from her.

"Hang on, now, I thought you loved clothes!"

"I do! I just don't have time to love them right now!"

I laughed. "Getting your place cleaned up doesn't have to happen until you get back. Who are you trying to impress, burglars?"

She smirked, but I noticed that she kept shoveling clothes into the dresser haphazardly, so I put my hand over hers, stopping her. "You look worn out, Red. Have you slept at all?"

"I've been excited," she admitted, dodging the question and therefore confirming my guess.

"Sit down," I instructed her. "Let me fold some of these things up, and when I'm done, you can show me where to put them. You've got, what, fifteen minutes before we need to leave for the airport? Plenty of time."

She didn't need to be urged. She collapsed gracefully on her bed, draping herself over the foot to watch me. "So. So. News on our favorite li'l psychopath?"

I glanced up at her briefly, then returned my attention to the top I was folding. "Ugh. Don't. You sound like him."

"What, that's a bad thing all of a sudden?"

"It's always been a bad thing." My declaration had a hollow ring to it. Pam, ever intuitive, picked up on it.

"Whoa," she said, rolling onto her back and peering at me upside-down. "You sound… half dead. Don't be offended, it's just that you look so… so defeated. What happened?"

"I'm not," I said softly. "Defeated, I mean."

"Then what gives?"

My eyes got stuck on the black velvet dress I was wrestling onto a hanger. "Stratford threw me in with the tank with the Joker again last night."

Pam's eyes were big and wide, and she was frowning just a little bit. "Finally gave in?"

"Yeah. But the Joker was being… slippery. More so than usual. We discussed human nature again, basically whether it's good or bad."

"You know, after going a month without speaking to each other, most people say things like how are you? or how's Jimmy doing in Little League?, but human nature works, too."

"We were continuing a previous discussion," I said, taking little note of her sarcasm. "But it got personal."

Pam stared at me upside-down, and then flopped over onto her stomach again and pushed herself upright. "Personal?"

I nodded slowly. "I've been seeing his side of things a little more." I pretended not to notice her sharp glance in response to this admission. "People… people here, they really are a dark species. Outside of Gotham, they may not have been so bad, but here… I mean, half of them are criminals and the other half won't do anything about it. I admitted that to him."

"Genius move, Harley. Give the crazy man the keys to your soul." I stared at her, and she brought her legs around and sat up. "You tell him you're empathizing with him and he's going to take advantage of it."

"I'm supposed to be the therapist here, right?" I questioned with a sardonic pucker of the eyebrows.

Pam frowned. "Supposed to be. You're the one making mistakes."

"Maybe I'm just growing up some," I said tersely.

"I still wouldn't have told him that he has a point."

"Well," I admitted, "he seems to think I'm more similar to him than I am to, say, you."

Pam snorted inelegantly. "That's a lovely thought. I can just imagine you with a scarred-up face and a bad dye job." She cast me a sideways look. "You're not getting close to self-mutilation and mass murder, are you?"

"Nowhere near," I assured her.

"Oh. Okay, good. Not that I would necessarily take issue with the mass murder. Sometimes I just want to destroy all of humanity and submit the earth to the care of nature once again."

"So you've said a million times before."

"Oh, at least a billion." She smirked at me and stood up. "Here, let me help you put those away; it's time to go. Oh, Harley!" She turned abruptly and flew into the closet.

"So much for the help," I said wryly.

She emerged. "Shush. I'm giving you a present; you should be happy. Here." It was the pair of gloves she had told me about, the elbow-length red leather. "They were gonna be too tight on my hands, so I didn't force them. Look." She stretched out her hand next to mine—hers was long and slender. Mine, in comparison, was little and petite. "The other gloves are made of rayon and cotton and they'll stretch some, but I figured it was best not to mess with leather. Plus, animal skin? No thanks. You can have it."

I didn't have any objections to leather, but even if I had, I was convinced that one good look at the gloves would have stemmed them. They were gorgeous, pale red, clearly sturdy and well-made and oh-so-long. "I'm not sure what I'm going to wear them with, but they're beautiful so I don't care," I said, taking them.

"You've got that cute little skirt, don't you? Wear 'em with that. Mix some high society with bad girl," Pam teased. "It'd fit you."

"Thank you, sweetie," I said, hugging her.

"You're welcome, precious," she responded, pressing a fast kiss to the side of my head. "You can thank me by helping me pick up this mess. I'm going to miss my plane."

We finished straightening the room, and then I gave her a ride to the airport, where I helped her find Dr. Woodrue. I'd met him once before, but he didn't stand out any more than he had previously—he was a slightly untidy, bearded man who looked as though he was too busy to worry about things like matching socks. I imagined I could see the incompetence Pam frequently vented to me about in private, but to her credit, she was nothing but professional with him.

I hugged her goodbye at the gate. "Be careful," I said. "Don't meet some sexy Egyptian guy and refuse to come home, okay?" She snorted, letting me know exactly what the likelihood of that happening was, and I smiled fondly at her. "I'm going to miss you like crazy."

"I'll miss you, too," she said, though I could see the distant excitement in her eyes and could tell she was already on that plane, making the descent to Egypt. "Take care with the Joker." I rolled my eyes and she said, "I mean it. I'll be back in a little over a week."

"Okay. I love you." I didn't say that to a lot of people and mean it, but Pam was definitely on that short list.

"Love you, too."

"Dr. Isley?" Woodrue was there, peering carefully at us. "We need to board now."

She gave me a quick smile, we showed each other our crossed fingers, and then she picked up her carry-on bag and walked away. As I watched her go, I felt a sinking feeling. I had just been deprived of my most solid anchor.

Anything could happen now.

On the way home, following an impulse, I stopped at one of those year-round costume shops. The seasonal Halloween shops were opening now—after all, it was the beginning of October and getting chillier with every day—but I figured a year-round shop would be more likely to have what I needed.

I was right, and I took my find home with me.

Five o'clock rolled around, and I returned to Arkham. I didn't know what the night would entail, but I had a general idea, and I decided to take things into my own hands. The second I entered the building, I headed directly for Stratford's office. As I drew near, though I could hear voices.

"—feeding her to the lions!" It was Dr. Wilson—I was used to his voice always sounding the same, a laid-back drawl, but he was almost yelling now. It was enough to make me slow down and listen carefully.

"She's our best chance!" Stratford snapped back. "I've tried almost everything else, including flying shrinks in from all over the country, and we've only ended up with wounded orderlies and offended therapists."

"You shouldn't be sending her in until you've exhausted every resource," Wilson said harshly. "You may be the director, but you're taking your power to extremes. You have no right to send her in again—for heaven's sake, Stratford, she's a baby."

"A baby," said Stratford coldly, "who's getting results. We get more of a response from him in one half-hour session with her than we do in entire months when we try other therapists with him. I can't afford to think about the potential casualties."

"Then you shouldn't be running this asylum," growled Wilson.

I decided it was time to make my presence known. Oddly enough, I wasn't at all hurt by Stratford's lack of concern for my wellbeing—after all, my feelings on the matter were much the same as his. As long as the asylum got results and I was able to study the Joker, my health—physical and mental—didn't matter much.

I stepped into the doorframe and rapped. Both men snapped their heads around to me sharply, and I regarded them levelly. "I'd like to speak to him again, if that's all right," I said, my voice cold and clear in the sudden silence.

Wilson stared at me, and then looked at Stratford for a long moment. When Stratford refused to make eye contact with him, Wilson scowled in disgust and left the office, brushing past me without a word.

"He's concerned about you," Stratford said after a minute's silence. "You left pretty abruptly last night."

"I was rusty," I said coolly and pointedly. "I needed some time to adapt to that mindset again. I'm better now."

He eyed me. "Yes, I can see that."

There was a moment's silence, and then I asked, "Are you letting me back on the case from now on?" It was mostly a formality. From the argument who'd just heard, I knew he was in a corner and I was his only way out aside from shipping the Joker to the state asylum, which I knew he was not willing to do.

He sighed and leaned forward, digging into his eyes with the heels of his hands. I felt a flicker of sympathy for him, but just a flicker. "I don't see that I have much choice," he said slowly. "He attacks everyone who isn't you. He won't even accept fairly accurate substitutes. He's determined."

I shrugged. "He feels as though we have a connection," I said. "He's not eager to share with anyone else."

"And you have some ideas on what makes you so special?" queried Stratford, looking up at me, making it sound like more of a sarcastic statement than a question.

"He's trying to lure me into his way of thinking," I said, refusing to rise to the bait. Stratford arched his brows.

"I noticed. It sounded to me like you were pretty convinced. If you remember, that's the reason I took you off the case in the first place."

"Good. If you believe that, then maybe he will, too. "

Stratford looked skeptical. "So you're running a farce to try and convince him to tell you more? Do you realize how badly this could hurt you if it backfires? How badly this could hurt us?"

"It's not going to backfire, Doctor," I said, showing my teeth in what was more a snarl than a smile. "I can be a very credible actress when the need presents itself."

He stared, and then shook his head. "I hope so, Quinzel."

"I know so," I said certainly. "I've got some plans for the next few upcoming sessions. A couple of unorthodox tactics I plan to try, and I could really use your support."

He looked suspiciously at me, but I just met his stare, betraying nothing. Warily, he asked, "You're not going to touch him again, are you?"

"No. I learned my lesson last time."

"Good," he said. He stared at me for another few seconds before nodding. "Fine, I'll send for him. Sign in and then go to the usual examination room."

I turned away, my heart pounding. He had bought it. If I could keep Stratford convinced that nothing was shifting around in my head, that I was just playing games with the Joker in order to cut through his bullshit and learn about him, then I could continue on with the sessions. Then, maybe I could figure out what was really going on with my brain lately.

It occurred to me that the whole situation was pretty messed up, me supposedly trying to fix the Joker when I was far from confident about my own mental state—but nobody said shrinks are perfect. We're just supposed to be well-adjusted.

Yeah, right.

I signed in and went to the second floor, where the usual orderlies were waiting outside of the usual room. I nodded to them and went inside.

He was sitting at the table, looking bored, slapping his rigid fingers together softly to indulge in his seeming need to always be in motion. When I came in, he lifted his eyes to my face, and his brows shot up in surprise.

I fought a grim smile, going to sit down in my chair, and I crossed my legs delicately before greeting him. "Good evening, J."

He stared at me for a second, and then the look of surprise turned into a slow, deliberate smirk that turned his taut face into a mass of creases. He looked better. He had slept, I could tell—the purple of the shadows beneath his eyes was much reduced. "Good ev-e-ning… Harley," he said, drawing out the greeting, making it a caress.

"You look better."

"I gotta say," he said, leaning forward and ignoring the observation, "I'm impressed. I thought it'd be a couple-a days for sure before you came back."

"I don't hide from my thoughts, J. I try to confront them head-on, which is why I had to leave. I couldn't keep talking to you and face my own head."

"Nooo," he droned, "I guess… not." He leaned back then and looked expectantly at me. "Well?"

I didn't feign ignorance. I knew exactly what he was asking me, and I gave him his answer. "You have a point," I told him. "Without bad, there would be no good. What you do serves a purpose."

"Ahhh," he purred, sounding indomitably self-satisfied. "So, then… why is it do you think that I'm, er, locked up like some… common criminal?"

"You scare the populace," I said steadily. "You don't follow their rules, so the general idea is that there must be something wrong with you." I looked at him to see if I was warm.

"Hmm?" he said, cocking his head to one side—hearing me, encouraging me to go further with it.

"So, because you're different from them, they decide to have you locked up and rehabilitated. Common criminals, now, they just get shut away as though they don't exist. You're something a little out of the ordinary, so we've got to try to brainwash you. As soon as Stratford has what he needs from our sessions together, you watch—he'll have you undergoing shock therapy, hypnosis, maybe lobotomy if they get desperate… anything that has a chance of changing you back. Back to normal. Because you're a representative of chaos, which is a rebellion against order, then you must have been normal at one time, right? You must have been normal in order to rebel against normality." I glanced his way again.

"Hmmmm," he hummed, still hearing me, still wanting me to puzzle it out for myself.

"But," I continued, lifting my eyes to the ceiling so that I didn't have to watch him and be distracted as I thought, "what if you weren't? What if you were never normal? You could just as easily have been born like this. Just because ninety-nine point nine percent of the populace is born 'normal', or what we call normal, that doesn't mean everyone has to be. Some people are born without what we call conscience. Some people are born with abnormal brains. Some people are born with so much intelligence that they can't bear it and have to get out."

He didn't make a noise this time as my eyes flicked to him. He just sat there, completely motionless, his eyes locked so completely on me that I wondered that I didn't burst into flames on the spot. He blinked once, slowly, licked his lips, and kept staring.

"You could have been born you, in which case there is no brainwashing. There is no rehabilitation. You can't return something to normal that was never normal in the first place. If your purpose in this world is to preach chaos, then there's no changing that."

"Why, Doctorrrr," he said, his face taking on a pleased grin again, "you're telling me that you… you, the big advocate for hope in the human race… has given up hope for me?"

"Not exactly," I said, looking steadily at him and finding that I was able to encounter his eyes this time without being quite as unnerved. "No. It's more… more that I'm finding out that hope has no place with you, at least not hope for normality. It'd be wiser to hope that you don't become normal."

"Are you saying, Doctor, that… I'm perfect the way I am? That I should… be myself?" He managed to make the Hallmark tripe sound nightmarish.

"I'm saying that this is bigger than humanity," I said softly. "It's bigger than our definitions of right and wrong. Shakespeare said the world's a stage, and good shows need conflict. If you change, then it'd be a pretty damn cheesy story, and that's one thing I've noticed about the world's grand plots—they're rarely cheesy."

He burst out laughing, bouncing up and down on his chair, giddy from my declaration. I thought through my little speech and realized that it was pretty ridiculous—I was basing my current breakdown on him on the supposition that the world was a theater that didn't play shitty movies. "Laugh if you want," I said resignedly. "It makes sense to me."

"And that's—" he paused, gasping for air and recovering himself slightly—"that's all that matters, isn't it, Haaaaar-ley?"

This time, the way he said my name sounded distinctly taunting. I bit my lip as I stared at his teasing face, and then said abruptly, "I've got something for you."

"Ah?" he said, raising his eyebrows in seemingly polite interest.

I reached into the pocket of my lab coat and drew out several small plastic containers. I set them on the table in front of us—one, two, three. His gaze raked over them once, and then lifted back to my face as if to ask me what the hell I was thinking.

"It's paint," I said, hoping my voice didn't reflect my inward uncertainty. "Grease paint. White, black, and red." When he didn't say anything, I started rambling to conceal my discomfort. "It's generally regard to be the most powerful color combination in the world, which is why the Nazis used it for their uniforms and campaigns. Not that there's a link, but I found it interesting. People only think white and red when they remember your face, but they forget the black you smudged around your eyes. It may have been part of why you struck such a resonant chord." I reached out and picked one of the containers up. "Anyway, I just thought—"

He reached out then, managing to stretch his hands out far enough to just rest his fingertips on the edge of my hand. My eyes widened but I seemed incapable of pulling back—as ridiculous as it sounds, I didn't want to annoy him, and the memory of what had happened the last time we touched hands was currently far from the forefront of my mind. Instead, I stared up at him.

"I'm touched," he said, and of course he made it sound so very sarcastic, as though he meant a million different other things, worse things, but his eyes were unchanged and they burned straight through mine.

And then he drew back, and it was as if he'd never reached out, and I continued rambling as though uninterrupted. "Someone's gonna have to watch you, since because you turned playing cards into weapons you could do more with plastic, but I thought you'd feel more comfortable, you know. So." I cleared my throat uncomfortably. "Yeah."

He was picking at the bandage on his wrist, paying me no heed. If he hadn't been the Joker, I would have said he was feeling a little sheepish in response to the gift, but he was the Joker and I thought it was far more likely that he'd just gotten bored with me. I figured it was a good time to stand up. "I've got to get back to work," I said. "I'll see you soon."

"Good night, Doctor," he said lowly.

Only the Joker could make a phrase with no verbal or implied warnings sound so promising.