AN: It hasn't been my day, my week, my month, or even my year. But anyway, I'm not dead, and here's a fanfic chapter. =P If you're still reading, thanks for being there for me.
8. Cathexis
"If I'm not gloriously insane,
Then I'm just me again.
And if I'm me –
Then I can see."
- The Fantasticks, 2-12
The rec room was in its usual state of perpetual white noise and undefined smells, with the TV droning on mostly unnoticed about gymnastics medals and beach volleyball and the last row of fluorescents making that spitting sound every few minutes or so as they cast flickering light onto the ping-pong table. All the usual characters were in all their usual places, the fire-bug at her book and Mr. Beautiful Mind at the TV couch and Reptar chasing down stray ping-pong balls on the other side of the room, and nobody was bothering him at his table in the dim corner by the door, and the session today had been so successful that Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman had been ready to crawl over the table and start tearing at the collar of his shirt by the time he was done with her.
So if it had been so damn successful, then why was he feeling so …unsettled?
It was the question the Joker had been repeating to himself for the first half of his rec room hour – had been repeating to himself, in fact, since lunch that day, when the feeling of accomplishment had started to wear off and they'd left him alone with his thoughts. The session with Quinzel that morning had gone basically as he'd planned it, and in some ways even better; he had really only hoped to push her buttons a little, give her a few loaded glances in the moments when the camera was off and show just enough chest to get her engine started. What he'd gotten instead was the Good Doctor going glassy-eyed when he'd leaned in within sniffing distance and then practically shoving her breasts up into his face. She was bolder than he'd thought – more reckless than he'd thought – and that should have been cause for wild internal celebration. So why wasn't he celebrating?
Because she knew you were lying.
The Joker picked up a stray newspaper someone had left on the table and opened it in front of him, making a wall between himself and the rest of the room so the face he was making wouldn't be visible. It was actually a current paper, something close to miraculous in Arkham's rec room which still had TV Guides from 1999 and magazines featuring Princess Di, and he knew he was focusing on that train of thought because he didn't want to acknowledge the answer he'd given to his own question. He hadn't been lying. Lying meant you knew what the truth was and you said the opposite. He wasn't sure enough about it to lie about it.
And that, in itself – the not being sure – that was worrisome, too.
There was an article on the second page criticizing the democrats' choice of running mate for their golden-boy presidential hopeful, and he tried his best to read it; but in between the thoughts he was forcibly thinking (the guy's name was Joe, and they wanted him in the White House? You couldn't get away with that, they'd have to change the man's name) all the things he was trying not to think kept creeping in anyway. He stared a hole into an insurance ad on the next page, wishing he hadn't asked himself the question in the first place and had left well enough alone. But he was there now, and he realized as he read the same sentence for the fourth time that he was going to have to answer himself.
Ah, hell.
She had asked him if the Joker was really who he was, and he'd said what else is there? like it was the only possible answer. She'd asked him how he knew he'd surrendered to the right gravity, and he'd said experience. He'd answered her like she was on a trapeze without a net, and like he was standing on the firm ground below her.
But to be honest – something he was less and less with himself, these days – he wasn't even sure if there was any ground at all.
His answer hadn't really been a lie, no. But his confidence in it had been, and he'd only started realizing that once he'd had time to let the adrenaline of the successful session wear off. It was a realization he could do without. His assurance of the facts as they stood was actually tenuous at best, but it was necessary; as necessary as a fisherman's faith in the soundness of his boat. He might as well have said "It'd better be who I really am, because otherwise I have nothing to fall back on."
Nothing except—
Nothing except a dead man.
That thought had come out of nowhere, and he stuffed it back down underneath his other thoughts like something that wouldn't quite fit in the trash can. The dead guy was dead, and there would be no talk of falling back on him. He couldn't be relied upon. That was what got him dead in the first place. The Joker had been brought in to re-PLACE the dead guy, because you couldn't have a dead guy walking around in a body that was still (mostly) alive, and they'd been doing just FINE under the new MANagement, thank you very much. But every now and then, the dead guy found a way to make his presence known, like a ghost rattling chains or scampering around the hallways at night. The Joker grimaced; his brain was its own gothic novel, only it was his old self he had locked up in the attic instead of an unwanted wife.
Careful… a voice nudged.
He knew who that voice belonged to, and a little growl made it out of his throat before he could stop himself.
Are you sure he's locked up there alone? the voice prodded.
No, actually. Come to think of it, he wasn't sure of a lot of things right about now. And it was all… her… fault.
Oh, you can't blame her. All she did was ask a question.
"Well, then I can't let her ASK any more of those, now can I?" he muttered into the fold of the newspaper, flipping irritably to the next page. It was the entertainment section. The circus was in town. God, he was tired of irony that wasn't being generated by him.
You can't stop her from asking questions, that's her job. They'll notice.
Well. That was true, he had to admit. The Good Doctor was going to have to keep asking questions, because that was the arrangement. If he wanted to keep playing with her, he'd have to let her stick to that. "But that doesn't mean she can keep asking questions like THAT," he murmured to the picture of the ringmaster. No, no more questions like that. No more questions that rattled him and made him unsure of his own footing. He would just have to turn the tables on her, that was the thing. Dis-tract her. Rattle her before she had the chance to do it to him.
But how?
It would have to be her next assignment, he knew. He hadn't picked it yet, but whatever it was that he set her to read this time would have to push all her buttons hard enough that she was too flustered to push any of his. It would need to be something that unbalanced her before she even walked into the room – something that made her question her own standing, her own reality. And it would have to be something that did it in a way that didn't set off her alarms. That was the tricky bit – finding something that would affect her that strongly without her noticing she was being affected. It would have to be—
The Joker froze in mid-thought, staring down at the bottom right corner of the entertainment page. Across from the circus flyer, below the two dueling movie critics arguing about Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, was a playbill for Midtown Community Theatre's latest show. Grinning darkly, the Joker slipped his hand down the page, his right thumb tracing the sharp, slanting script of the title and the silhouette of a couple framed by the crescent moon.
Oh.
Oh-ho, hee-hee, ha-HA.
"Fan-TAS-tic," he muttered to himself, and then cackled at his own joke. The orderly across the room glanced over at him warily – laughing seemed to have that effect on these people – and he reluctantly swallowed the giggles, flattening the paper on the table and smoothing out the wrinkles as if to show how safe he was being. Nothing to see here, OF-ficer, just a man and his newspaper. He kept it up with a straight face until the orderly lost interest and went to bother someone else; then he began folding the paper at the edges of the playbill, creasing and re-creasing it from both directions so it would tear away cleanly. It was going to take a lot of folding to get a sharp edge, but he had the time. And, of course, they wouldn't let him have scissors.
After a few minutes, he was giggling again. But quietly.
Harley watched the ice cubes she had taken from Dr. Leland's mini fridge as they plonked down into the depths of her coffee thermos, crackling a little in protest. The coffee itself had been a mistake today – it wasn't even nine o'clock on a Tuesday morning, and it was already eighty degrees outside and humid. She hadn't been able to bring herself to have more than a few sips, debriefing or not. It was just too hot for any beverage that steamed.
Leland had taken the tape of Harley's session the day before and, presumably, had watched it some time yesterday evening after she'd taken care of her own case load. The TV with the VCR built into it was perched at the end of the conference table with Leland's notes spread in front of it, and Harley wondered if the notes being left out was a good sign or a bad one. She had made some risky moves yesterday – both on and off camera – and she'd had all night to think about whether or not Leland would be pleased with her for making progress, or pissed that she'd whispered something the camera couldn't hear. Maybe both. But on the bright side, at least all of the agonizing about that had kept her from spending the night thinking about what the Joker had said when the camera had been off.
Tell you my dreams if you tell me yours.
"Excellent, now you are thinking about it," Harley muttered into her coffee, stopping before she even tasted it because the steam was still too hot. His voice had slipped so clearly back into her head that Harley glanced at the TV, half expecting the session tape to be playing – to find out that the recording had caught that exchange after all. The tape recorder in her brain had certainly caught it; she'd heard that repeated phrase at the back of her mind (or behind her ear?) every time she'd stopped worrying about Leland for more than a few minutes. "I don't want to tell you my dreams," she grumbled, putting the coffee down hard enough to make a few drops splash up out of the opening. The thought of telling the Joker what she was actually dreaming about was (exciting) terrifying. Granted, at least they weren't sex dreams (yet) – but every time she'd drifted back to sleep last night, she'd gotten a replay of last week's feature, with the Joker endlessly whispering in her ear just close enough to brush against her with his lips. The heat in the office suddenly felt overwhelming, and Harley contemplated going over and sticking her head in the mini fridge just so she could breathe.
"Sorry I'm late," Dr. Leland huffed from the doorway, interrupting her thoughts as she powered across the room and dropped a thick folder on the table. "Been hiding in the west hall bathroom between meetings to keep myself from melting. It's the only room on this entire floor where you can get cooled off this morning."
"Yeah, I might go there myself when we're done here," Harley frowned, trying to get her thoughts under control enough to remember how to make small talk.
"McKnight sends his apologies, but he's stuck with Arnold Wesker talking him through another meltdown, so it's just us girls today," Leland said, picking up a page of her notes and the remote control. "But that's fine with me, because now that you're the lead on the Joker's case, these debriefs are mostly just to make sure you're holding it together. I don't plan for them to be interrogations like that first one. You've had three sessions with him now, which is more than most people, and I just want to stay on top of the whole situation and keep track of progress. We're not going to take too long today, just run the tape and address areas of concern. You're not actually going to drink that hot coffee, are you?" She settled herself in the seat beside Harley and turned on the TV, bringing up a blurry still of Harley's back and the Joker's face that jittered with static every few seconds. Harley shook her head.
"No, not if I want to avoid heat stroke," she smirked, trying not to stare at the Joker's paused face on the screen. Leland chuckled.
"Yeah, that's the real trick today, isn't it?" she smiled, and then she started the tape.
The recording was a little shy of forty minutes long, and Leland mercifully fast-forwarded through some of the lengthier bits of the conversation, pausing here and there to go over her notes and ask Harley for her reflections on her own performance. Harley was relieved – she didn't seem to be overly upset about all of the whispering at the end of the session, although she didn't ignore it completely. As Harley watched herself lean forward on the recording, Leland paused and put down the remote, preparing to write. "Now, what did he say to you there?" she probed, raising an eyebrow at the paused image, and Harley shrugged, opting for the truth.
"He asked if my mother ever told me not to try and change a man." Leland frowned at the connotation of the question.
"And you said?"
"I said my mother wasn't really much on giving advice," Harley replied, which was sort of what she had said, in a fuzzy, evasive sort of way. "I'm sorry it wasn't loud enough for the camera to pick up, but I've found that he tends to be more responsive when you mirror his body language and speaking volume. He wants a conversation to be like a… like a dance routine, and I think it upsets him when the person he's talking to isn't doing the same steps."
"Hmmh," Leland grunted, scribbling something in her notes. "Well, I get it, but be careful you don't 'mirror' yourself right into trouble. You were leaned in pretty close to him there at the end. Close enough that I think if he'd wanted to, he could have grabbed you, cuffs or not. Try to keep a little more space from now on. Lessen the odds of giving me a heart attack."
"Yes, ma'am," Harley nodded, trying desperately not to start imagining what being grabbed would have felt like (all that heat coming off his hands).She felt the prickle of impending sweat and was suddenly glad there was a heat wave to take the blame for her flushed cheeks.
"He didn't really answer you there at the end, did he?" Leland interrupted her thoughts, rewinding the tape a fraction. "There, before the whispering. When you asked him if he'd change his gravity if he could."
"No, he didn't," Harley breathed, glad to talk about something less dangerous. "He just said it was a lost cause, not whether he wanted to or not."
"That's an interesting question to avoid, don't you think?"
"I do," Harley agreed. "Actually, I think it's where I need to focus from here on. Whether being the Joker is what he wants. That's an important distinction to make – not only from a therapeutic perspective, but from a legal one, too. I may not come right out and ask him that again, not for a while, but I think that question is central to deciding what we want to try to accomplish with him. I'm going to try to make that the focus of my inquiry, if I can manage it without him getting too touchy."
"Do that," Leland nodded, writing something else before closing up her notebook. "I like the idea of you having a plan, not just reading whatever he gives you."
"Speaking of, has he said anything about what he's giving me next?"
"Not to me," Leland replied, taking her notes to her desk, "but I haven't seen him this morning. Check your box, though. Orderly said he gave him something last night to pass on to you. Hopefully it's not a severed body part. Or a bomb."
"I… don't think a bomb would fit in my door box, Doctor Leland," Harley said, holding her straight face until Leland looked up at her and realized she was half-joking.
"I don't know if I should be less worried," Leland chuckled reluctantly, "or if you should be more worried, but go on and see what it is just in case. And then meet me in the east hall conference room; we've got a new patient being admitted today, and I want you to observe how intake procedures work."
"Sure," Harley smiled, relieved to have gotten out of a debriefing unscathed. "And I can put my coffee in the freezer while I'm there." She picked up her thermos and headed for the door.
"If your mailbox is ticking, Quinzel, evacuate everybody from the offices, would you?" Leland called after her. Harley laughed back over her shoulder.
"Everybody but Doctor Burton?"
"I didn't hear that, Quinzel," Leland said, not looking up from her desk. But Harley thought she could see the twitch of a grin behind her mauve fingernails.
At first, Harley thought there was nothing in the box on her door after all; it was made of dark grey translucent plastic and angled open like a file folder, and nothing was visible in it as Harley unlocked her office and shoved her coffee in her mini fridge. But on her way back out, she put her hand down inside the box and shuffled it around, finally being rewarded with the whisper of paper. She pulled out what had been left for her and looked it over, raising her eyebrows in amused surprise. It wasn't a note or instructions, or the name of a book (or a severed body part, or a bomb) – it was an advertisement carefully torn out of a newspaper. Harley skimmed the large print as she locked her door behind her.
Midtown Community Theater presents:
THE FANTASTICKS
Harvey Schmidt, music; Tom Jones, lyrics
Directed by Mo Miller
The World's Longest-Running Show!
August 21 – 24, 2008
7PM Nightly – Sunday Matinee 3PM
Below the title was the image of a couple and a crescent moon, all in silhouette. There were no notes or bits of writing on the ad that Harley could see, so she turned the paper over on a hunch. Sure enough, scrawled across the block text of whatever had been on the back of the entertainment page were five words in magenta crayon: YOU CAN… IF YOU CAN. "Cryptic, as always," Harley grumbled. She had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but it was definitely written in the Joker's handwriting, and she figured it would probably make sense once she had seen the play. "At least it's not about gravity this time," she muttered to the empty corridor. Then she folded up the playbill, stuck it in her pocket, and headed off to observe the new patient intake.
During the whole procedure, she only thought about dreams once.
Midtown Community Theater sat square in the middle of 16th Street, across from the leafy canopy and weird modern art sculptures of Grover Court Park. It had been a movie theater back in the '30s and '40s, and the old LANTERN marquee was still visible above the vinyl "Midtown Community Theater" banner and awning. The theater and the park across the street were part of Gotham's slowly-spreading arts district, nestled like a buffer zone between the nice middle-class neighborhoods of Fort Clinton and Red Hook and the seedy areas like Crime Alley and the Narrows. A five-minute walk to the north would land you on a street where you could buy homemade candles from a forty-year-old soccer mom; a five-minute walk south, and you could buy meth at the Opera-House-side entrance to St. Mary's Park. The Grover Court arts district, with its street performers, starving artists, and murals, was the perfect liminal space between the two sides of Gotham, and in daylight, like during a street festival, it put on a good show; but in the hour before sunset, it had always set Harley a little on edge. It was far enough from the Narrows that you might want to let your guard down – but close enough to the Narrows that you probably shouldn't. And if someone fired up a lighter in the dim shadows of Grover Court Park, Harley would never be sure if she was about to get an invitation to a drug deal, or an impromptu rendition of Rent. You never really knew, in Grover.
On Thursday evening, Harley got off the bus at 16th and Roberts and made her way down to the theater, thankfully without any solicitations or flash mobs along the way. There was about an hour of daylight left, and the sky above the marquee was a soft watercolor of pink and orange that faded prettily into the yellow twinkle of street lamps and ticket box lights. Harley had called the box office as soon as she'd gotten out of the patient intake meeting on Tuesday, and had been pleased to discover that while the weekend shows were mostly full, there were still plenty of good seats left for the Thursday opening performance. In the intervening forty-eight hours, she'd built herself up from mild interest to an almost unbearable curiosity. From what she could tell, the play looked like a cutesy romantic musical – and that didn't seem like the Joker's style at all. But of course, things were rarely as they seemed with the Joker, and she figured she'd better reserve judgement until she'd seen it. In any case, the crowd she was shuffling through in the lobby seemed to be made up of all types – the obvious college thespians, a couple of clearly wealthy people trying to blend with the peasants, some elderly intellectual-types, families, couples on dates; in short, not solely the crowd she would have expected for a cute romance. There had to be more to it than that. Harley got some popcorn and a soda and found her way to her seat, four rows back and a little left of center, and sat down to read the program. Maybe it would give her some idea of what she was in for.
"Are you looking for a friend in the cast, or just getting up to speed?"
The woman on Harley's left gave her a friendly smile and nodded at the program, and Harley shrugged. "Getting up to speed, I guess; a patient recommended I come see this, and I've got no idea what it's about."
"Oh, you're a doctor?" the woman said conversationally. She was curvy and round faced, and Harley guessed she might be just past thirty. "We all work in communications," she went on, indicating the other woman and two men who were sitting further to her left, "which is a fancy way of saying former theater majors who couldn't make a living at it." The other woman nodded, and the two men both chuckled. "I'm Jordan, and this is Maggie, Russ, and Michael."
Harley shook Jordan's hand and nodded at the others. "Harley," she introduced herself, and decided to use her resources. After all, the Joker had allowed it last time. "So… theater majors? I guess this is your wheelhouse, then."
"Yeah, we were all in Fantasticks in college," said Russ, who was chubby and looked like someone who laughed a lot.
"Together?" Harley smiled, feeling like she'd hit the jackpot. Russ reached over Jordan and pointed to the character list.
"Yeah, that was me – Mortimer."
"And I got stuck playing Bellomy, who is in fact a man," Jordan said wryly.
"I was El Gallo," Michael grinned, and Maggie raised her hand at the end of the row.
"Luisa," she said brightly. Harley skimmed the character descriptions in the program (which seemed purposefully vague, she thought) and looked back at them.
"So you two were the villain and the star?" she asked the two at the end. They looked the parts; Michael was tall, lanky, and reminded Harley a little of Valentino, and Maggie looked like someone who sang to mice and birds when she woke up in the morning. The four companions looked at each other and seemed to share a thought at Harley's question.
"Um… well…," Michael ruminated, smothering a sly grin, "that really depends on what you think makes someone the star of the show – and what you think makes someone the villain."
Ah, Harley thought. There's the Joker's point. It's one of those Is The Villain Really A Villain questions. Now I get it. Out loud, she said, "So what is it about, then?" Again, all four of them looked at each other in that knowing way.
"Growing up," Jordan said after a moment, "and how much it hurts."
"The ridiculousness of mundane things," Russ grinned, "when you look at them from the outside."
"What you want, what you think you want, and learning the difference," Maggie added. Michael leaned forward in his seat and put on a dark face that Harley thought must have been the one he'd used on stage.
"Illusions," he said slowly. "What's real, what isn't, and how we can manipulate ourselves into getting those two things confused. What happens when we chase the wrong one." He looked a lot like Valentino now, with the smirk and the half-lidded eyes, and Harley thought it was a damn shame that he was almost certainly gay. She had absolutely no luck at all.
I thought you said Bad Boys weren't your type? her brain very helpfully supplied, and she had to catch herself before she answered back out loud.
They aren't. He's not a real villain, he just played one on stage. Now shove it.
"Wow," she chuckled nervously, trying to drown out the internal monologue that was quickly becoming a dialogue. "And here I thought it was a cute romance."
"It's that, too," Maggie laughed.
"It's all of that stuff at once," Jordan nodded. "And whatever else you get out of it. They leave a lot to the imagination in this play – which is also kind of the point – and you get to decide what you think they're really saying."
"And you get to decide whether El Gallo is the villain, or the hero, or something in between," Michael grinned. "Let us know what you decide when the play's over. I'm curious." The lights were beginning to dim as the last stragglers were being shown to their seats, and the stage lights cast dark shades over Michael's eyes that suddenly and forcibly brought Harley's mind right back around to the Joker. She was about to go back into the rabbit hole of thinking about her dream when Russ reached over and tapped her arm.
"And let us know if you see the Phantom Stage Hand. Keep your eyes peeled."
"Phantom stage hand?" Harley murmured in the growing dimness, and Jordan nodded.
"One of the backstage people got murdered here last year, apparently. Place is supposed to be haunted."
"Right," Harley nodded, not at all interested in theater ghosts but glad to have been distracted from her dangerous train of thought. In the pit below the stage, the orchestra started up a bright, bouncy overture, and Harley resolved to keep her mind squarely on what was happening on the stage. As long as she focused on the characters and the music, she wouldn't have to think about the Joker. As long as she was invested in the play, she was safe.
She was not safe.
Not in a theater, not anywhere. And damn it, but the Joker had known that. Somehow he knew what dreams she was having, what state she was in, and he'd picked that play on purpose.
In the rational light of day, of course, that wouldn't make sense – how could he possibly know what she was having dreams about? But in the atmospheric confines of the theater, it made perfect sense. Seemed almost obvious, even. Of course he knew. This was the Joker, after all.
Everything was fine for the first few scenes, fine enough that Harley let her guard down. The two teenaged neighbors, Matt and Luisa, were in love in spite of their feuding fathers – completely unaware that their dads had manufactured a fake feud specifically so their kids would fall in love. Cute, but also a nice commentary on how easily people are manipulated. (Harley would have liked to scribble that down in her notebook, but it was too dark in the theater to take notes.) The two feuding fathers had then hired a band of circus performers, led by the bandit El Gallo, to pretend to kidnap Luisa so Matt could heroically rescue her, thereby giving them an excuse to end the feud so their kids could be together. The trouble was that once they were allowed to be together, the kids realized that all the romance was gone – and Luisa realized how exciting it could be getting snatched by a cape-wearing bandit.
A very sexy cape-wearing bandit.
Was it a rule that you had to be hot to play El Gallo? Harley thought it must be. The guy on stage didn't have Michael's Valentino-look, but he was lean and graceful, with shoulder-length locs and bedroom eyes and a shirt that was open just one button too far, and Harley didn't blame Luisa one bit for being more interested in him than in Wally Cleaver and his sweater-vest. And she was absolutely sure that the Joker would have known that about her. But she had still been fine, still been safe, until the start of the second act.
"Don't do that," El Gallo had said softly, catching Luisa's hand as she tried to slap him. "You'll hurt your hand." And he'd kissed the hand that had been on its way to slap him. And Luisa had, of course, been ruined. And down in the audience, Harley had sucked in her breath and crossed her legs and tried very, very hard not to let her clenching thighs make the hinged seat creak and give her away.
Damn that man, Harley chanted internally as she tried to focus on anything except the grinning bandit. Damn that man. He knows what I like better than I do.
Of course he doesn't, Harley. That's ridiculous. Isn't it?
Sure it is. It's just a coincidence that he's manipulating you without even being in the same room.
Ugh. Damn that man.
The lobby of Harley's building was mostly deserted by the time she got home that night, although she could hear and smell someone doing laundry through the open side door as she went to unlock her mailbox. They were clearly using the second dryer from the left, she thought, because she could already smell the lint threatening to catch fire in the lint trap. They must be new to the building. She wondered if she should go warn them; normally she avoided the welcome-wagon small talk, but a conversation with a new neighbor might banish some of her repetitive intrusive thoughts about the Joker and his remarkable ability to hit a target without even being present.
Maybe it'll be a guy, and maybe he'll be cute. And single. And maybe he'll need help with laundry. And maybe if you had a boyfriend, you wouldn't be half crazy over a T.
"Yeah, and maybe he'll be a stalker or a serial killer, and I'll have to move," Harley muttered under her breath, finding nothing but a credit card offer in her mailbox and slamming it shut.
Well, it doesn't look like serial violence is a deal breaker for you, now, does it?
"What it looks like is that I need to go to therapy myself," she hissed, a little louder than she meant to; when she turned around, Dale the Desk Guy was staring at her with one eyebrow raised.
"You okay, Doctor Q?"
"Just, um… glad it's not bills!" she fake-grinned, flapping the envelope at him, wishing she'd noticed Dale was still at the desk before she'd started talking to herself. At the sight of the envelope in her hand, Dale's face shifted suddenly into work-mode, and he waved a finger in the air.
"Oh, that reminds me!" he said, reaching under the desk. "You got this today but it wouldn't fit in your box. Here." After a moment of feeling around, he came up with a large flat box with a note taped to the lid. For a split second, Harley remembered Leland's half-joke about a bomb in her office mail slot; then she saw that the handwriting on the note was the swoopy, spidery hand of someone old and probably pretentious, and she relaxed a little. "It's from one of those fancy dress stores Uptown," Dale was saying as he handed it over. "You goin' somewhere fancy, Doctor Q?"
"Fancy and boring, Dale," she said wryly, realizing what the package was. James's mother must be a fast shopper. "Fancy and boring. It's a work thing." Harley tossed the credit card offer into Dale's shred box behind the desk, thanked him for holding the package for her, and made her way upstairs with it, trying not to trip over her own feet but loosening up with relief. She wasn't exactly looking forward to the benefit dinner, but the delivery was well-timed. Playing dress-up in new fancy clothes was exactly what she needed to take her mind off the Joker for the evening.
Harley dropped the dress box onto her bed and peeled off the note, reading it as she got undressed. She had been right about the handwriting; it was from James's mother and looked exactly how Harley expected a filthy rich third-generation doctor's wife's handwriting to look.
Doctor Quinzel; my son kindly provided me with not only your measurements and your strictures against orange, but also with an exhaustive description of your coloring and complexion (helpful) and his own suggestions as to your personal style (which I have happily ignored). Enclosed you will find the gown I thought most suitable for your complexion and build and for the event which you will be attending. Please assess the fit and let James know if you find it disagreeable or if it needs alteration. – Marjorie Claypoole McKnight
"And she had to sign all three names, didn't she?" Harley quipped, tossing the note on her dresser. The stuffed Charmander she'd spoken to tumbled forward off her pillow, overwhelmed by his proletariat disgust. She moved him out of her way and opened the dress box.
"Oy, vai," she mumbled as she pushed back the tissue paper.
It was a floor length halter-neck evening dress made out of a blood-red silk velvet that, judging by the way it moved, was more expensive than any fabric Harley had ever touched in her life. Harley pulled the gown slowly up from its folds until it slithered out of the box and trailed off the bed. Both the leg slits and the neck were high, and there was an open keyhole in the back to make up for the modesty in front. Strands of glittering garnet stones, so dark red they were almost black, draped across each shoulder in lieu of sleeves. Harley stared at it blankly for a moment, then sighed.
"She should have just paid off my tuition. It would have been cheaper." Charmander didn't say anything in return, but he rolled the rest of the way off the bed, and Harley took that as agreement. She didn't even want to think about what the dress had cost, and she wondered absently as she shimmied into it if she was expected to give it back after the dinner. Once it was on, however, she stared at herself in the mirror and decided that if they really wanted it back, they'd have to pry it off her cold, dead body. It fit like a glove, better than anything she'd ever shopped for herself, and if at least one dirty old man at the benefit didn't spill his drink looking at her, she'd be shocked.
"I'd ask me out, in this dress," she murmured to her reflection. "I guess Marjorie Claypoole McKnight wants to make sure her son's date makes an impression." That thought suddenly put a damper on her little fashion show – if James could already barely keep his train of thought around her at work, he might forget to breathe standing next to her at the benefit. And I thought we were trying to discourage him from that? she thought wryly.
"We are," she answered herself. "Because we're stupid. Because we want to leave the attractive, polite, sweet, generous, Princeton-educated doctor with a trust fund for someone else to snatch up. Tell me why that is, again?" She said this in the direction of the stuffed Charmander, which was still lying on the floor with its embroidered nose in the rug. The Pokémon's imagined response was as snarky as ever.
That would be because we're much more interested in men who are rude, intense, dangerous, and have a decent likelihood of landing us in jail or the hospital.
"Yeah, what do you know? You're a toy."
Harley kicked the plush Charmander under her bed where she couldn't see it and stalked into the living room to work on her notes for tomorrow's session.
"There is a curious paradox that no one can explain. Who understands the secret of the reaping of the grain?"
El Gallo was standing in dim stage light, staring out into blackness. She was still Harley, but she was also Luisa, going to town in a sparkling gown to have her fortune told. The garnets on the gown's shoulders looked like fresh blood in the stage lights. She would go to El Gallo, and they would dance until they couldn't stand any longer, and then they would fall together, and he would kiss her upon the eyes, and she would remember that kiss forever.
"I do not know the answer. I merely know it's true. I hurt them for that reason, and myself a little bit too."
"What did you say?" Harley asked, waiting for El Gallo to turn and face her with that dark, smoldering look like Valentino. "You won't hurt me. You're my bandit."
"But I have to hurt you. Otherwise, I wouldn't be a bandit." He spoke out over the dark rows of seats, voice echoing in the blackness, and no matter how she positioned herself he refused to meet her eyes. She tried to turn him, to take his hands so they could spin across the stage, round and round like a carousel.
"Why won't you dance with me?" she asked, but he didn't answer.
He still wouldn't look at her, and this wasn't at all how she'd pictured meeting him. She was dressed up for him, and he wouldn't look at her. Trembling, causing the garnets on her dress to cast red flashes across the stage, she drew back her hand and launched it at his unheeding face.
The sound was both flat and sharp, a discordant echo in the empty theater that oscillated in the still air and came back to her ears in waves, PAK PAK PAK Pak Pak Pak pak pak pak, like too many clocks ticking out of time, until it fell into silence again. But it was her arm that hurt when it should have been his face. She had closed her eyes and didn't remember closing them; when she opened them again, he was staring down at her, not moving, not speaking, dark eyes flashing dangerously, and he was El Gallo, and he was also the Joker, and the sound she had heard had been her wrist smacking into the flat of his upraised palm. His skin was hot and soft and his long fingers were digging unrepentantly into her flesh, fingernails leaving little half-moons on the outside of her arm, thumb pressing against her hammering pulse. His scars were completely still. His mouth didn't grin, but his eyes did, and that was worse.
"I…," Harley began, but she didn't know what she wanted to say. The Joker pressed his thumb harder against her wrist, and his eyes burned.
"Don't do that," he scolded, his voice sounding thick and breathless. "You'll hurt your hand." He looked down at that hand, which was starting to tingle in his tight grip, regarding the fingers like words in a very difficult book that he very much wanted to understand. She thought she might tell him that he was the one hurting her hand – but then, that's what he was supposed to do, wasn't it? He was a bandit, after all. And if she spoke she would spoil his concentration. The Joker slipped his dark eyes over every inch of her hand, of her wrist; then he turned his gaze up to her face and locked his eyes on hers. They peered into each other.
Then he slowly lifted her palm to his lips.
The sound of Harley's gasp was swallowed up by the theater's darkness. His breath was warm and filled up her hand like water, spilling down her arm and causing her to shake. He held the kiss in her palm for five, six, seven heartbeats, as if he wanted to feel her pulse against his skin as long as he could; his lips were soft and hot and fluttered against the center of her palm like a little heartbeat of their own. Slowly, Harley relaxed her hand in his grip, and her fingertips drooped and landed lightly against the scar on his left cheek. The skin there was silky and rolling, and the tip of her middle finger fell gently into the hollow at the end of the scar. The Joker's grip tightened and he pulled her hand away from his face, letting her fingertip trace the outline of his scar, and for a moment she was afraid of the hardness in his eyes. Then he laughed softly.
"Why not be wild, if we feel that way?"
"Can I?" she whispered. The Joker's grin deepened.
"You can… if you CAN." Then he lowered his head not to her hand, but to the bend of her arm, holding her wrist tightly enough to bruise but kissing her softly on the delicate butterfly-wing skin on her arm's inner face, passing her wrist from his right hand to his left and pulling her ever closer to the enveloping mass of his body. She felt hot from her spine down to her knees, and when he pulled her wrist so high behind him that he had to let go of it, she felt herself clutch at the back of his neck to keep herself upright. Her fingers dug into his hair, and the smell of him engulfed her as his lips wandered further up her arm.
When he reached her shoulder, he sank his teeth into her skin.
Harley woke on her couch the next morning, still wearing the garnet evening gown, her notes spread in a fan on her lap and the alarm clock blaring from the bedroom. The draped strands of gems were digging into her right shoulder, and she had fallen asleep with her wrist bound up under her body. Her right hand was asleep. Breathing deeply, trying to reorient herself in reality, she finally pushed herself off the couch and went to turn off the alarm, shaking her hand to restore the circulation and making a point not to look at her palm.
She was afraid of what she might start thinking about if she looked at it for too long.
"Doctor Harleen Quinzel, in session with patient number AH-08-62-43, inmate number 72108-099, alias The Joker; Friday August 22nd 2008, beginning session at 10:07 a.m." Harley said it with more confidence this time, not tripping over her words, and she counted that as a point in her favor as she tucked the camera remote into the little triangle of space between her thighs and the chair. It was good to score a point now, because that was probably the only point she could count on. After waking up on her couch, after that dream… Harley took a deep breath and tried to keep from clicking her pen convulsively. She had to get it together, or even the camera would notice.
The Joker sat across the therapy room table, leaning forward today instead of lounging back in the seat, looking terrifyingly happy to be there. The newspaper playbill lay in the center of the table between them, and he was wiggling it back and forth with two fingers, the chain on his cuffs jingling softly as he hummed a tune that only made sense to him. His white cotton shirt sat just a little off-center on his shoulders, giving Harley a devastating peek at the deep notch behind his collarbone. Had he stretched the collar out even more since Monday's session? She couldn't be sure, but there was a freckle visible where neck met shoulder that she was pretty certain she hadn't been able to see before. And that's exactly what he wants you to be focusing on instead of starting the session, her internal monologue grumbled, and for once she was inclined to listen to it.
"Well, Joker," she began, looking at her notes to force her eyes away from him, "you seem a little more eager than usual today. I take it this one is a topic you're excited to talk about?"
"Ah, it's an exciting play," the Joker replied, spinning the playbill beneath his fingers until it drifted back across the table to stick under Harley's notebook. There was a little smirk drifting around the corners of his mouth that said he knew precisely what Harley was excited about, and that the fact that she'd used the word excited was deeply amusing to him.
"Do you like it because it's essentially multiple choice?" Harley asked, stomping on the brakes before he decided to talk about what excited her. "I read in one of your previous session transcripts that you once told Doctor Kabir you preferred not to commit to any one version of events when talking about your past, because you preferred your past to be multiple choice. And I asked four different people last night what they thought The Fantasticks was about, and I got four different answers. And I'm still not sure which answer I agree with. Is that what you like about it – that it's so open-ended?"
The Joker laced his fingers together, letting the handcuff chain droop against the table surface. "If you don't get attached to one version of right, it's hard to be wrong."
"And you hate being wrong, don't you?" Harley grinned. The Joker made a face.
"Well, it happens so RAREly…," he trailed off, wiggling his fingers dismissively, and Harley laughed in spite of herself.
"So what's the play about, in your opinion? I mean, if you had to pick one answer."
"Nooo, no, no, you first," the Joker rumbled amiably. Harley took a minute to look at her notes again, waffling between what she thought he would say, and what she thought he wanted her to say. Somewhere in that waffling, she found her answer.
"It's about wanting," she said, still forming the thought as it came out. "What you want, what you think you want, and learning the difference between the two." It was the answer Maggie had given her the previous night, and Harley found that she couldn't phrase it any better than that. The Joker raised an eyebrow.
"IS there a difference?" he asked glibly. "I mean… if you think you want a cheeseburger, then, ah… you want a cheeseburger."
"Well, what about when you take a bite of the burger and realize that wasn't what you wanted after all?" Harley countered. The Joker snorted.
"You still wanted a cheeseburger," he said, shaking his head. "You got one, and it didn't live up to what you WANTed. So, you decide to want …something …else. That wasn't a difference in thinking versus really wanting. No, that was you changing what you wanted because something happened to change it."
"So you feel that there isn't a difference between perceived want and actual want," Harley clarified, "and that what actually happens is a change in perspective, which leads to a change in desire?"
"Bingo, Doc," the Joker grinned, leaning forward on his elbows. "You want something until an outside force makes you change that, and then you want something else. Which, ah, begs the QUESTion… if your desire changes based on your situation… is it really what you want at all?" He tucked his lower lip under his teeth in his characteristic way, and the tilt of his head scattered a flash of fluorescent sparkle over his eyes that made Harley feel both comfortable and wildly nervous at the same time. She had the sudden overwhelming urge to clear her throat and just managed to suppress it, not wanting to show any signs of turmoil to him or to the camera.
"So… the play is about desire to you, too," she followed, crossing her arms and trying to lean away from him, "but more about the manipulation of desire. Right?"
The Joker smiled softly – which was somehow more unnerving than his usual broad grin – and then leaned back a fraction on his elbows, as if politely giving her a little more space; but Harley was pretty sure it was more like the way a cat might back up before pouncing. "There's only one character in the whole PLAY who isn't being manipulated by someone or something," he said after a moment, and he lifted an eyebrow that invited her to answer.
"El Gallo," Harley supplied, and the Joker nodded.
"The whole story is about manipuLAtion. Of yourself, of other people. The parents are being manipulated by El Gallo, the kids are being manipulated by the parents, and by their books, and by their own false assumptions… even the AUDience is being manipulated, because El Gallo breaks the fourth wall and tells them how to feel about what they're seeing. Did, ah… did you get a chance to de-cide what kind of character you thought Luisa was, hmm?"
"No," Harley agreed. "El Gallo was in control of the narrative the entire time and made sure the audience had only the feelings he wanted them to have." Just like you made sure I had exactly the feelings you wanted me to have, Harley added internally, and the Joker grinned as if she'd said it out loud.
"And even when they think they're re-BEL-ling, the kids are doing exactly… what… their dads… have planned for them to do." He tilted his head again, and this time Harley grinned.
"Because like you said last week, there's really no such thing as teen rebellion, just a bunch of pre-determined patterns of pseudo-deviance. Right?" The Joker bounced in his seat and stifled a giggle, clearly pleased that she remembered.
"Tell me, Doc," he smirked, "what's the quickest way to get a teenager to think something is cool?"
"Tell them the adults don't like it," Harley smirked back. "So they think they're choosing for themselves, but really they're just choosing the opposite of whatever their parents chose – so no matter what, their 'choice' is still being determined by someone else's."
"Whatever we think is keeping us from choosing," the Joker rumbled, settling back in his seat, "is actually what's causing us to choose."
"You're talking about the Wall," Harley said after a moment's thought. "Matt and Luisa think the wall between their yards is their enemy, like it's keeping them from being able to make choices, when really, it's the only reason they made the choice in the first place. Without the wall there to influence them, they wouldn't have chosen each other. The wall is what made them attractive to each other."
"We want," the Joker said softly, beginning to lean in again, "what we're told… we can't have." He suddenly gave Harley a look that sent a shiver through her, and she only just suppressed it by clenching her pen and locking all of her muscles so tight they hurt. There was a knowing twinkle in his eye as he went on. "We want whatever is on the other side of the wall, even if we don't know what it is. We want it just because it's over… the wall. We want the thing we can only see in moonlight through the chink in the bricks – the thing we can juuuuust glimpse through the eyeholes of the mask. Why is that, Doc? Hmm? Why are we so… de-si-rous… of the things in the shadows?" He had said we, as though including himself in some human collective, but Harley could see the real pronoun in his eyes – why do you want it, Doc? Why do you so badly want something that aaaall your RuLeS say you can't have? Harley put her pen down to keep herself from clicking it wildly on camera. The Joker was watching her intently, one corner of his mouth lifted just a fraction in what threatened to be a smile. Harley took a deep breath.
"Because if the wall is in the way, you can't see all the details," she said, answering slowly to keep her composure, "…and if you can't see all of it, your imagination fills in the gaps. And your imagination is always better than reality."
"Is it, now?" the Joker asked, his tone heavy with implication. "And, ah… why is that?"
"Because…," Harley began, not even sure of what she was going to say until she said it. "Because when you imagine something it's always bigger or easier or newer or more satisfying, and once you get it, it's never any of those things. As soon as you can see something up close, you make it ordinary."
"As soon as you can see it up close," the Joker corrected, "you're able to see the PUPpet strings." His cuffed hands came up between them, fingers dancing like they were controlling an invisible marionette. "See, imAgining gives us the illusion of choice. When things are blurry and we can imagine what we want to see, we never see the manipulation. We want… what we're told… we can't have… because what we really want is something that doesn't have any strings attached."
"You keep saying that same phrase," Harley mused, ignoring his invitation to talk about control and social norms again. "What we're told we can't have. You always frame it that way. Do you believe there's really anything we can't have, or do you think everyone should have whatever they want, but they don't because they're manipulated into thinking they can't?" The Joker's eyes skittered back and forth over her face for a second or two, and Harley felt like he was skimming her like a page in a book before deciding on his answer. Finally, he dropped his eyes to the table and then brought them back up to her slowly – deliberately, she knew, so she would have to meet his gaze under the gauzy curtain of his eyelashes.
"I believe…," he rumbled, "…you can if you CAN."
(he lowered his head to the bend of her arm, holding her wrist tightly enough to bruise but kissing her softly on the delicate skin of her arm's inner face)
Harley felt herself hiss in a sharp breath, and she clenched her teeth as the dream came stampeding back into the front of her brain. The Joker was smiling softly, probably looking to the camera as if he was pleasantly waiting for her response, looking to her as if he'd had a front row seat for her dream. She cleared her throat, rubbing her inner arm to dispel the tingles that were suddenly walking up and down the surface of her skin.
"You can if you can. El Gallo said that to Luisa when she asked if she could sit in the tree with him. And it's what you wrote on the playbill you sent me. Is that the most important part of the play for you?" She asked him the question as if that was actually what she wanted to know. What she really wanted to ask was, how the hell do you always seem to know what's inside my head? But of course, she couldn't ask that on camera. The Joker's scars twitched with the beginnings of a grin.
"It's the whole point of El Gallo," he half-chuckled. "That's the only real limitation. You can… if you can. There's no such thing as may I, only can I. People can do whatever they're capable of doing, and they can't do what they're not capable of. Per-mis-sion is, ah… imAginary."
"Just because it's imaginary, does that make it undesirable?" Harley asked, finally able to unclench her shoulders. The Joker shrugged.
"Well, if you want to spend your whole life frustrated, then…." He made an equivocal face that said other people's poor choices weren't his problem, and shrugged again. "But it's aaaall imaginary, all the things that cause people to be disappointed or to constantly change what they want. Permission… and rules… and the Wall… and the mask that El Gallo puts on Luisa to distract her from what's right in front of her FACE… all fake. And fake is always disappointing. What we're all really aiming for… is to get ahold of something real." His cuffed hands made a grasping, squeezing gesture between them, and there was a sparkle of honesty in his eyes. Harley made a concerted effort not to be distracted by his wrists.
"And for Luisa, that Something Real is El Gallo?" she prompted, and the Joker unclenched his hands and began to gesticulate with his fingers again.
"See, ah… everyone else in the story tells her… you can… IF. If you follow these rules, or line up with this TEMplate, or live up to this standard. And El Gallo tells her… that she can if she can. It's a, ah… a revoLUtionary thought for her."
"And that helps her get to something resembling reality for the first time," Harley mused, "which is what she's really been wanting the whole time. Her whole intro, her opening song – it's all about a character who's desperate for sensation, for something that feels real."
"NOW you're getting there, Doc," the Joker grinned, leaning back in his chair. Harley picked her pen back up and began using it to prod at the pages of her notes, trying to shape her next thought into something that made sense.
"Then why does she balk at it once he gives it to her?" she said after a few moments of silence. "El Gallo shows her all sorts of things that are real – I mean, he does it like a circus ringmaster, and none of it is visible to the audience, which makes it seem imaginary to us, but actually, all the things Luisa sees before he puts the mask on her symbolize the reality she's so desperate for. And then when she gets to that reality, she isn't happy with it? She wants the mask back?"
"Put on your mask, then it's pretty," the Joker quoted darkly. He waited a moment for Harley to remember the line he had referenced, and then he leaned forward over the table again, making Harley suddenly aware of how close to her he could get if he really wanted to. "Y'see, ah… reALity… is like falling off a bike. It's easy to DO, but it's not easy to feel. It's simple, but it's not always nice. And it's easier to understand, but it's rarely easy to deal with. Sometimes the only thing that's easy on your … e-mo-tions… is to believe the lies and put the mask back on. If you want something pretty, then, ah, by all means, stay in the mask. If you want something true, you'll have to go through hell to get it."
"…Or if we all must die a bit before we grow again." This time it was Harley's turn to quote, one of the few specific lines from the script she had written down because it had struck her. The Joker grinned up at her from the middle of the table, inviting her to go on. "It hurts because when you take off the mask, you're not just taking off a mask, right? You're shedding something like a snake shedding skin. Except what you're shedding are… expectations. Rules. Puppet strings. Long-held beliefs. Maybe even sometimes a whole version of yourself you have to let go of. Sometimes you have to shed a whole person. Right?"
"Aaaand underneath that person you just SHUCKED off," the Joker rumbled, leaning casually on his elbows, "is something pink and fleshy and raw and sore to the touch. Something that hurts like hell every time it moves, but at least it's awake."
Harley studied the Joker's face as he finished speaking, trying to imagine what the chocolatey color of his eyes would look like in sunlight – or in any light other than the glow of rage that always seemed to be pulsing from behind them. She thought about a younger, scrawnier, freer version of him, without scars, driving a car too fast around the Palisades at night with the Goo Goo Dolls or Nirvana playing from the tape deck, or being late for history class or skipping gym, or playing Nintendo with friends after a day of swimming. She thought about that faint ring-mark on his left hand. Who was he? she wondered. Who did you shed, Joker? What was his name? What kind of life did he live? And why did he have to die?
Out loud, she said, "So, we've come back around to the whole 'pain makes you real' idea, hmm?" She said it with a little smile that let him know she was onto him, onto this game of bringing every conversation back to the same song lyric, the same point. The Joker shrugged as if to say well, what did you expect?
"Pain," he said slowly, "is the only clue we have that what we're seeing is real. How do you check to be sure if you're dreaming or not, hmm? You, ah… you give yourself a little pinch. Juuuust enough pain to test your reality. And we always… check, Doc. Even when we'd be happier not checking. We always pinch, we aaaalways need to know if it's real or not, because real… is the only thing that will ever satisfy our natures. Even when what we're dreaming is fan-TA-stic… in the end, we need to know if it's a dream or not, because the real parts of us are always SCREAMing to get ahold of whatever other real things they can find. Even if we balk at them once we find them. Even if we don't know what to do with them once they're in our hands. Real calls to real. Our deepest, most basic realities, well… they always eventually go looking for something that matches them."
"And that's why Luisa is so interested in El Gallo?" Harley responded, speaking softly after the intensity of the Joker's words a moment before. The Joker grinned.
"That's why Luisa is so at-trac-ted to El Gallo," he corrected, "in spite of how she claims to feel about Matt. In spite of what she knows about Matt, what she knows about El Gallo. See, El Gallo is the first person to cause her any real pain… and that pain is the first real thing she's ever felt. Aaaall that singing about sen-SA-tions, all that … desperAtion. El Gallo is the only character who ever fills that void. He is reality, everything else is fake… and the part of her that's real knows that. If you asked her, she'd deny it. She wouldn't want to be attracted to El Gallo. But she can't help it. And she shouldn't have to help it. It's her most basic nature." He was looking at Harley without blinking now, looking slightly upward at her through his thick lashes, a hint of a grin sitting in the corner of his mouth giving her just the briefest peek at his tongue, the tip of which was probing at his scar tissue on the inside of his cheek. Harley realized that he had leaned and angled himself in just such a way that the camera behind her probably couldn't see his whole face because her head was blocking the view – and before she could shift in her seat to change that, he shot her a look that made it clear exactly who he was talking about not being able to help her most basic nature.
He knows me better than I do, she caught herself thinking just as she had during the play. Damn him, he knows me better than I do, and he picked this whole stupid play just so he could sit here and dissect my attraction to (him) El Gallo. Dammit dammit dammit.
"But he isn't real, either," she heard herself saying without any forethought, and the Joker raised an eyebrow, his look demanding an explanation. Harley prodded her notes with the end of her pen, as if the pressure on her hand might help ground her again. "El Gallo, he's not any more real than anyone else. How can he be? He spends the play manipulating her, making her see things that aren't true. He promises her they can run away together, and then he leaves her behind with no explanation. He promises to give her necklace back and then runs off with it. He tells her lie after lie after lie."
"Yeah," the Joker said flatly, almost amused. "Right after he tells her the truth."
"What truth?" Harley frowned, fanning her notebook pages as if inviting the Joker to sort through them and find some corroboration there. The Joker sat up straighter, propping himself up on his forearms so that his laced fingers rested on the edge of her notebook and his collarbone made an inviting V behind the rim of his white shirt. Then he smiled.
"All the truths. He tells her… that he steals whatever people treasure most. She just assumes he's talking about monetary value. That's her false assumption, not his lie. He tells her… that he steals dreams. She just ignores that because she doesn't want to hear it. She gets to see the receipt… for all the pageantry her father paid for. She… knows… what El Gallo is. El Gallo shows Luisa what manipulation looks like. He gives her aaaaall the tools to see through it, even when he's the one doing it. He's the only person in the story to ever equip her with that kind of weapon. And now…." The Joker shrugged and made an odd little gesture with his cuffed hands. "Now she has the ability to choose between real and fake for herself. El Gallo proves he's real by allowing her to choose the lie instead of forcing it on her. She buys the lie. But that was her choice. Unlike everyone else, he let her choose it herself."
And that's what he thinks he's doing to you, Harley thought, resting her chin in her hand and bringing her fingers up over her mouth so the Joker could only see the upper half of her expression. He sees himself as El Gallo, and he's so interested in keeping you as his therapist because he thinks he's El Gallo and you're Luisa, and that he's showing you what's real and what isn't. It's what he's doing with everyone, all the time. He has a very fixed idea of what reality is, and he's made it his job to do what El Gallo does – hurt people until they die just enough to shed what he considers fake. The way he did. The way he was forced to. Because if he has to walk around pink and raw and sore like an open wound, then so should the rest of us. The Joker was watching her eyes as she pondered, seeming to be able to read her even with half her face covered. Finally, she put her hand down.
"I hurt them for that reason—" Harley quoted softly, and the Joker tilted his head in a slow nod and leaned back into his seat. Neither of them finished the line.
(— and myself a little bit too.)
There was a moment of quiet, in which Harley made a show of underlining something in her notebook – for the benefit of the camera, not for the Joker. The camera wouldn't be able to see the direct eye contact she was making with him, her silent communication that she understood what he was doing and why. Then she closed her notebook and put away her pen, crossing her hands over the cover.
"Okay, Joker. Since you're so adamant that pain is necessary for a meaningful existence, then I guess that means you're not going to try to avoid the painful part of our sessions. Are you?"
"Twenty ques-tions. Oh, joy," the Joker sneered, making his characteristic teeth-sucking gesture to convey irritation – but Harley could see the little sparkle in his eyes that told her he was only pretending. She was starting to be able to tell when he was masking one mood with another false one; not always, but often enough to make her feel accomplished. He was feigning disdain for their end-of-session questions, but he had been looking forward to this one.
"I assume they've given you the extra pillow I prescribed," she said cautiously, watching him lean back and crack his neck, fake-fidgeting for the camera. His head rolled back to center and he raised an eyebrow.
"Ah, yes, they have. You wasted your question on that?"
"Ah, I didn't phrase that as a question," Harley smirked, and the Joker rolled his eyes. "I also assume that with that new pillow, you've gotten more sleep, and I hope that means you've got something to discuss today. So, my question is: what did you dream about this week? One thing. Tell me one dream."
The Joker regarded her coolly from under half-lidded eyes, and she knew he was deciding whether he wanted to tell her something true or something made up for the camera. He was leaned back in the chair with his cuffed hands draped over his stomach, looking so comfortable and so normal that it made Harley remember (against her will) how their last session had ended.
That soft, easy, achingly normal voice with which he had said it.
Tell you my dreams if you tell me yours.
"I'll tell you one of mine, if it'll help you decide on your answer," Harley heard herself saying, regretting it almost immediately but having no way to reverse course. The Joker raised his eyebrows in what would look to the camera like mild interest; behind the expression, Harley could tell he was staring at her like someone who'd tried a Hail Mary solution to get a car started and was now watching the car drive away without them.
"Oh, ah… DO tell," he said, the high lilt coming back into his voice, and behind the feigned nonchalance his eyes were electric.
"Well," Harley began, fighting the urge to get her pen back out and click it, "earlier this week, I had a dream about a man." She paused, which was a bad choice.
"Oooh," the Joker sing-songed. "Was it a, ah… was it a dirty dream?" His tongue snaked out and traced the curve of his lip, and Harley couldn't tell if it was an unconscious gesture or a choice.
"Well, I'm sure you know that it wouldn't be appropriate to give you any details," she said, trying to sound like she was professionally offended and not like she had clenched her legs at the way he'd said dirty. "But there was an element of sexuality in the dream, yes. Unfortunately, it was a dream about a man I really shouldn't be dreaming about."
"Shouldn't?" the Joker sneered. "And, ah… who made that rule?"
Harley sighed, as if she were bored with his line of thought. "I shouldn't because he's not a healthy person to be around. In fact, I'm painfully aware of how toxic he is." The Joker was holding back a grin, but it twitched at the corners of his mouth.
"But you're …dwelling on it anyway, in spite of this awareness?" he nodded to himself, softening his voice into a parody of the Therapist Tone that Harley had always hated when she'd heard her classmates use it in clinic. She played along.
"Of course. You don't exactly get to choose what your brain dwells on when you're asleep, now do you?"
"And, ah…," the Joker began, clearing his throat gently and stepping fully into his charade; moving softly enough that nobody watching the camera would be alarmed, he reached out and slipped the notebook out from under Harley's hands, flipping it open and tucking a strand of hair behind his ear as though he were adjusting glasses. "And… you have these dreams often?" He had taken the pen out of the notebook and begun to scribble on the empty page he'd turned to, and it took Harley a long moment to register how much danger she was suddenly in.
He had her pen.
He had the damn PEN.
Should she end the session immediately? Call in Cash before he had a chance to use the pen for anything except pretending to be the therapist? Or should she keep playing along? Show him she wasn't afraid, like she'd done with the coffee cup? He's got something to lose too, she reminded herself frantically, because she didn't want to end the session. Not like that, anyway. He's got something to lose too, because if he tries anything with that pen, he goes back to no privileges and no interesting doctors to talk to. And he's having fun. Surely he wouldn't want to wreck that. Harley stared at the Joker long enough to communicate that with her eyes – that he'd better not dare mess this up – for either of them.
"The dreams are frequent enough to be bothersome," she said easily, pretending the pen was just a pen and not a weapon of mass destruction. The Joker was holding it like any other person who had stopped to gesticulate in the middle of writing, bridging the gap between his fingertips and the base of his thumb, and – God, she could have laughed if it wasn't so dangerous – he actually had enough slack in his ankle chains to cross his legs, completing the picture of an old-school Freudian therapist taking notes from a patient on the couch. He pretended to write down her answer, nodding that Therapist Nod that Harley knew all about.
"And… d'you find that these dreams interfere with your daily functioning in a, ah… clinically significant way?" He was looking at her over her notebook the way she knew she had probably looked at people during her first few bumbling sessions, and she didn't know whether to laugh or scream.
"No, they don't," she sighed pointedly, "and I think it's your turn now. You're the one who's supposed to be answering the question." She held out her hand for the notebook, but he didn't give it to her. Now he was actually writing something, not just scribbling or pretending. For a while, he didn't look at her, just at the page. Whatever he was writing wasn't lengthy, but he was making each letter slowly, deliberately. Taking his time.
"I dreamed…," he said seriously, still writing, "…that I was Casey Jones." He underlined something he'd written before clicking the pen closed. Harley blinked, confusion momentarily replacing fear.
"Casey Jones… as in… like, the guy from Ninja Turtles?" She had no idea what she'd been expecting him to say, but it definitely wasn't that. The Joker flicked an amused look up at her through his eyelashes and then clicked the pen open again, dashing her hopes that he might give it back. He started doodling in the corner of the paper instead.
"You, ah… you never dreamed you were a movie character?"
"No…," Harley said slowly, wondering if that made her an oddity or if it was just a gender thing – both guys she'd dated in college had dreamed they were Iron Man on a regular basis. "Not that I remember, anyway. Although I did once dream I was in an episode of E.R."
"Chasing George Clooney?" the Joker smirked, still working on his drawing. Harley sighed.
"Chasing Doctor Kovač, actually, and you're avoiding the discussion. So you dreamed you were Casey Jones. Were you in the movie, in your dream, or were you Casey Jones in some other context?"
"Ya know, I can't be a hundred percent sure," he grinned down at the notebook, "but I don't think there was a scene in the movie that involved hanging out the window of a speeding car and whacking mailboxes with a cricket bat." There wasn't – Harley wasn't the foremost expert on Ninja Turtles, but she had watched that first movie enough times as a kid (unabashedly ogling Casey Jones, if she was honest with herself) to know there was no mailbox baseball scene. The Joker knew there wasn't, too; she could tell by the quality of the grin that kept flickering around the corners of his mouth. She could also tell that whatever he'd dreamed about, it hadn't been Casey Jones or cricket bats, but he was making a show of answering her question for the camera, and he expected her to play along. It wasn't precisely fair – he'd said he'd tell his dreams if she told hers – but then again, Harley reasoned… there was always time for telling the truth after the camera turned off.
"So, is this a dream you've had before?" she asked, playing along.
The Joker glanced up at her again through his eyelashes, and this time he let the grin stay on his face.
They stretched it out until it was nearly time for the Joker to go to group session, talking about the dream as if it had actually happened and making a good show for the camera – discussing childhood heroes who didn't have the same appeal in adulthood and what made people dream the things they dreamed, all things Leland would expect to hear them talk about, and Harley made herself notes about how Casey Jones was a man who saw himself as doing good, but who operated outside the law, and other useful nonsense she could bring up when questioned by Leland. The Joker was polite and well-behaved and threw up no red flags by leaning in too closely or gesturing wildly with the pen, and none of it really mattered. When they brought the conversation to a neat conclusion, the Joker slid the notebook and the pen back across the table – Harley could see that beside the wild doodles, he had written what looked like a book title and an author's name, probably her next assignment – and she made sure the camera saw him return the pen before she brought the clicker up from her lap and turned it off.
For a few seconds after the camera light went out, she didn't move.
"You lied," she said softly – not accusatory, simply stating the fact. The Joker raised one eyebrow.
"Yeah," he said matter-of-factly, mimicking her tone. "And now you can tell the difference." He wasn't exactly grinning now, but his eyes had that darkly cheerful sparkle to them that said this had been his focus all along. He had wanted to see how much she was able to read in his face, what she could pick up on and what he could get away with, and he was amused by the results. Harley gathered up her things, wishing she had more dead time to play with before she had to buzz herself out of the room; but if she left it too long after the end of the recording, there would be questions, and besides – the little bit of survival instinct she still had left told her that too much unobserved time with the Joker might be pushing her luck. Reluctantly, she reached for the door buzzer.
"A promise is a promise, Doc," the Joker said behind her, stopping her once again with her hand hovering over the button. When she turned back around, he was looking up at her with that intensely serious gaze he seemed to reserve for these liminal moments without cameras or witnesses. She didn't reply, but she gave him a look that said Go on. "You, ah… you wanna know what I really dreamed about?" he said softly, and Harley had to restrain her eyebrows from saying Well, obviously.
"Of course I do," she made herself say calmly. The Joker made a show of examining his fingernails.
"Same thing as you, Doc," he muttered, looking a little disconcerted for the first time that day. "Somebody I shouldn't be dreaming about." And then he brought his eyes back up to hers slowly, milking the look for all the impact he could get, and Harley felt a shiver of heat run through her in spite of herself.
"Shouldn't?" she heard herself say. "And who made that rule?" She held still just long enough to register the surprise on the Joker's face, the little blink of alarm at hearing her return his own words to him when he hadn't expected it; then she buzzed herself out the door.
In the small break room over lunch, James talked and Harley pretended to listen. They were occupying the whole surface of the rickety table, surrounded by notes and charts and take-out containers from the hot dog stand across the bridge, and James was three acts deep in a five-act monologue about the chronic under-funding of America's mental health system, and Harley hadn't heard most of what he'd said since they'd sat down because she'd been too busy staring at the Joker's scribbles in her notebook.
The assignment was a title she'd never heard of, something called "Amok," and beneath it the Joker had written the name Krystian Bala, underlined three times and overwritten to make the letters bold. But the assignment wasn't what Harley kept looking back at between every third word on her chart. What she kept looking back at was the drawing. Alongside the assignment, taking up space as though it was trying to push the words off the page, was a wild but surprisingly accurate doodle of – of course, Harley thought wryly – none other than Casey Jones. The Joker had drawn him lounging on a porch swing, referencing a particular movie scene so she couldn't possibly mistake the drawing for anyone else. Harley made a face at her notes. It was supposed to be a comedic scene, but the Joker had somehow managed to draw Casey like Jack Dawson drawing one of his French girls, turning a doodle of a greasy man in sweatpants into something almost sexual.
Oh, don't kid yourself, Harley muttered internally, trying to focus on her charting. He didn't have to make it sexual. You did that yourself the first time you watched the movie. And that was what she was really perturbed about, when she got right down to it. It wasn't the drawing – it was that somehow, once again, the Joker had seemed to be able to read her mind. Because unless he was a mind-reader, then how the hell else would he have been able to land so precisely on an obscure character who had just happened to be one of her first childhood crushes? It wasn't like he had gotten lucky with a guess about John Stamos or some teen drama actor or a boy band member that could have applied to any woman in her age group. No, instead he had gone for Casey Side-Character-In-A-Boys-Movie-Who-Chews-With-His-Mouth-Open Jones. And instead of missing wildly, he had sunk her battleship.
And now, here she was, trying to concentrate on paperwork while her brain was being hijacked by the seductive wiles of nondescript gray sweatpants.
"Harley, are you listening to me?" James said from across the pile of papers, breaking through the fog. Harley sighed.
"No, but you can keep pretending I am if it makes you feel better." She filed away the report she'd been finishing, found the stack of mistreated papers left over from Doctor Burton that she was supposed to fix, and put her head down on her portfolio with a thunk, staring longingly at the vending machines that still hadn't been repaired after Rhonda's wild adventure. The Joker was inside her head, and she still had to reorganize Burton's files? And to top it all off, there were no candy bars? It was too much. James followed her eyes from the papers to the out-of-order machines and put down his pen.
"Do you want me to help you with Burton's trash pile?" he offered cautiously, putting away his own charts.
"Yes, please," Harley murmured, sliding one paper-clipped bundle out from under her head and handing it to him without sitting up. James flipped through the coffee-stained pages and sighed himself.
"See, your mistake was letting them see that you were good at your job," he said wryly. "You should never let them see that you're competent, at least not while you're still an intern and they can dump on you. Now that they know you're capable, they're going to have you cleaning up Burton's messes for the rest of your time here."
"Happy happy, joy joy," Harley muttered, but she managed to drag herself back into an upright position and took the next clipped bundle of pages for herself. James gave her a tentative little smile, which she reluctantly returned, and then they got down to the business of sorting Burton's messy files in silence. As they worked, Harley glanced over at him from time to time, struck once again by the absolute ridiculousness of her own brain. If you asked a broad cross-section of young white professional single women to design their own Franken-Stud, a good sixty percent of them would probably turn out a result very similar to James McKnight. He was tall, but not Too Tall; he had broad shoulders and the kind of thick, dark brown, glossy hair that you knew wasn't going to start receding until he was in his seventies; big, clear blue eyes; a crooked smile that generally meant a man was incapable of deception; and great teeth. Really great teeth. He was independently wealthy from a long line of pure-bred aristocrats, but he was also a doctor, making money in his own right. He was Ivy League, a good conversation without being pretentious, and best (or worst?) of all, he was excruciatingly reliable and helpful. Not to mention, he had managed to convey that he was interested in her without making her feel endangered. In short, he was The Perfect Man, and any rational woman would have already caught feelings for him weeks ago.
Good thing you're not a rational woman, then, hmm?
Harley gritted her teeth and pressed her pen a little harder against the paper she was writing on. No, apparently she was not a rational woman, because here she was sitting across a table from Doctor Hallmark Hunk, and all she could think about was how good a certain terrorist would look in gray sweatpants.
Then exactly what kind of woman are you?
That, of course, wasn't a question she really wanted to answer at the moment, not with James across the table and her recent session with the Joker still playing in her mind. She tried to concentrate on rewriting Burton's indecipherable notes, but the Joker's voice kept bleeding through.
Our most basic reality always goes looking for something that matches it.
Real calls to real.
Across the table, James had started talking again, this time telling a story about another intern Burton had driven to madness a couple of years earlier, and Harley was sure she would have found the story at least educational, if not downright funny, if she'd been able to pay attention to it. But she was too unsettled by the implications of her own train of thought to drag herself back out into the real world.
You may not know precisely what kind of woman you are, Harley, but you know exactly what kind of man the Joker is. Maybe not who he used to be, but who he is right now. He's not exactly keeping it a secret. He tells you. He lets you see it. Just like El Gallo told Luisa the truth so that if she picked the lie, it would be her own informed choice. You know who the Joker is, because he's told you. So if you're still so drawn to him… what does that say about you?
Real calls to real, after all.
Harley wasn't sure if that last statement was her own inner voice, or the Joker's, and that was the most unsettling thought of all.
Nothing, Harley told herself, finishing a page and flipping to the next. It doesn't say anything about me, because people aren't defined by who they're attracted to. If that was the case, then the Joker's attraction to ME would say just as much about HIM. Right?
Of course, she was asking the question of her own internal monologue, and so there wasn't anybody there to provide the comforting answer.
"I think we should add sweatpants to the Joker's list of privileges."
James glanced up at her, his pen in the middle of a word and his mouth half-open in the middle of the story he'd been telling. Harley hadn't meant to interrupt him in mid-sentence, but then again, she hadn't exactly been listening, and she also hadn't really planned to say it out loud. James closed his mouth and went back to what he had been writing.
"I… think that's probably going to get a veto from Leland," he said; if he was offended at being interrupted, he didn't show it. Harley kept writing on her own charts, but she pressed on.
"Why not? Other patients are allowed one pair of sweatpants as an option in their uniform wardrobe."
"Yep. Other patients who don't regularly try to kill people."
"Define regularly."
"Harley…,"
"What? He hasn't lashed out at anybody in at least two weeks, and it's not like the elastic waistband in a pair of sweats will be any more or less dangerous than the elastic waistband that's already in his scrub pants, or his underwear. If he was going to strangle someone with clothes, he's had plenty of time to do that."
James finally looked up from the forms he was copying and stared at her, as if trying to read her. "I take it you had a good session today?" he said finally. Harley managed to make her smile look professional.
"He used my pen to write down my next book topic, and as you can see, he did not then use said pen to do any impaling."
"Gee, I'm so impressed," James said flatly. Harley sighed.
"Look, I think it'll keep up the rapport we're starting to establish. He'll be more comfortable, and I may get even more out of him because of it." She met his gaze, and the two of them stared at each other across the sea of paperwork for a few quiet moments before James finally put down his pen and rubbed his hand across his face.
"I make no guarantees, but I'll talk to Leland and see what I can do."
"You're a knight in shining armor, James," Harley grinned; and as they both went back to their charting, she wished fervently that, just once, knights in shining armor could be her type.
The rec room was dim and flickering, lit by the three brave fluorescent tubes that hadn't yet blown and the strobing light of the television blaring out some chaotic professional wrestling show that nobody was watching except Derek and his hallucinations. It was nine-thirty, and there was an eerie stillness in the stale, sterile air. The rec room was uncharacteristically empty. Jervis Tetch had lost his privileges for the day, and Waylon Jones had asked to go back to his cell early because his new medication made him sleepy. Arnold Wesker was standing forlornly beside the ping-pong table, rolling a ball back and forth between his hands; and the guard in the corner by the door had fallen asleep. The side of the room where the lights still worked was nearly uninhabited, save for the one person the Joker wanted to talk to.
The idea he'd started germinating a week before had now laid down roots and was starting to put out buds on its little branches. It was quicker than he'd expected – he'd only had to do two sessions with the Good Doctor to get her where he wanted her, and now she was ready for the next stage. And oh, oh-HO, was she ready. The play had done exactly what he'd intended; if she was willing to come out and admit to him that she was having… ahem… inapPROpriate dreams… about him, then it had done better than he'd intended. Having the dreams was one thing. Admitting it was another. And he was pretty sure that she had told him just so she could see his reaction, so maybe his response would scratch the itch. She was like a former smoker purposefully walking past the open doors of an old bowling alley trying to catch a sniff of smoke to take the edge off and finding out that it just made the edge sharper. And that was what the Joker wanted. That was why he'd given her Amok as her next assignment. If she actually managed to get her hands on a copy, he'd eat his own boxers. Nooo, no, no, she wouldn't find it. She'd look for it until she couldn't take it anymore, and then she'd come jittering back to him like a junkie who Could Definitely Quit Any Time They Wanted To, begging for a session anyway.
He was interested to see exactly how long that would take.
The Joker sat on the couch and pretended to watch the greasy, 'roided-up men in leotards and trench coats dance around each other on the television with one eye, watching the well-lit side of the room with the other. There were only three people over there, and one of them was asleep at his guard post. Terri the arsonist sat in her usual corner chair with her usual novel, her head drooping ever lower as the uncharacteristic quiet and the soporific drone of the wrestling show lulled her to sleep. The Joker waited. All he needed was five minutes with the third person under the fluorescents, five uninterrupted minutes with all guards and nearby eavesdroppers asleep. It would only take five minutes to set the next part of the plan in motion, and then he could sit back and relax, wait for it to happen. If he was right about the Good Doctor, it would happen just in time to push her over the edge.
In the corner armchair, Terri fell asleep.
Bingo.
The Joker stood up quietly, leaving Derek and his imaginary friends to watch the wrestling without him, and made his way over to the two rickety chairs beside the magazine table – they looked like rejects from some dentist's waiting room, and he was pretty sure there was still a toothpaste smear on one of them. That one was empty; in the other sat Rhonda. She looked a little less wild than the last time he'd seen her, but that wasn't saying much, since the last time he'd seen her, she'd been crawling topless down a hallway covered in feces and getting tackled by the nursing staff's defensive line. A copy of People magazine lay on her lap, but she wasn't reading it, just tracing the outline of Angelina Jolie's face over and over with one shaky finger. The Joker watched her for a few seconds, sizing her up. Her jaw was slack and there was a hazy, sleepy look in her eyes, but he thought he could see some coherent thoughts behind the sleepiness. She was medicated, but she was lucid. Rhonda would never be precisely normal, but this was as close to normal as he was going to get. He sat down beside her.
"Hi," he said slowly, trying not to grin too early in the conversation. Rhonda didn't answer, but she made eye contact with him, and her finger stopped tracing Angelina's face and started tapping on her nose instead. She was listening. The Joker leaned in. "I, ah… I have the new target for your next mission." Rhonda lifted an eyebrow, and the Joker saw a little of the crazy come back into her eyes. Now he could grin. If all went well, Rhonda's next paranoid episode would play out according to his instructions, and she would carry out the next phase of his plan for him without ever remembering that the ideas were his and not her own. Slowly, carefully, he began laying out his blueprints and folding them into the framework of Rhonda's own paranoia, planting enough seeds that she would remember what she was supposed to do even when she was in the middle of a delusion.
By next week, the Joker hoped, those seeds would be a dark and thriving little garden.
