Therapy, Chapter I

As the guard leads my next patient into my office I prepare myself for the inevitable mental battle. He takes his seat without being asked to, eyes casually roaming the room, refusing to look at me. "How are you today, Professor Crane?"

"How would you be, forced to live out your days in this miserable excuse for a hospital? You make a mockery of me by insisting I stay here."

"I believe you deserve to be offered an opportunity for rehabilitation."

"Really? Have you invented a cure for a shitty childhood? An inoculation against bullies? Have you rounded up all the fools of the world and done away with them? I have done more to improve society than you have with your ideals about 'rehabilitation.'"

I must fight to suppress a sigh of annoyance, which would only encourage him. Does he truly believe what he says, or is it simply an excuse for his antisocial behavior? Perhaps this session will be the one which will offer me an answer. "Society will always have its bullies, but we have improved significantly in how we understand and deal with them. You use a costume as a coping mechanism and to avoid healthy social interaction. I think that, if I could help you gain confidence in yourself, you would see how unnecessary it really is."

He meets my eyes for the first time and I see the flicker of interest that enters them when I mention the costume. He sets his hands on his knees and leans toward me. "You have a man here who funnels his aggressive impulses into the persona of a ventriloquist's dummy. Classic dissociative identity disorder. That is a coping mechanism. That is the kind of person the asylum was built to treat. My costume is a tool, an object of social manipulation. I do not wear it for my benefit, but for the masses that have been trained to fear it."

He grins widely.

I decide to approach the issue from another angle. "Do you feel different when you wear the costume?"

"Yes."

"Do you think you would answer my questions any differently if you were wearing it right now?"

"Could I?"

His voice lowers and his eyes widen. He looks like a child who has just been offered a treat if he promises to behave himself.

"I am sorry, but it is against hospital policy."

He smiles again. "Come now, doctor, be honest with yourself. That is not the true reason you will not give it to me. You know better than anyone what happens when I put it on. You are afraid to let me have it."

"I am not frightened of you, Crane. Without your chemicals and other weapons you are just another man, far less intimidating than many of the other patients I see on a daily basis. A costume would not change that."

"Prove it. Let me attend the next session with it on, and we will see how you really feel about the Scarecrow."

"Do not try to shift the focus of this conversation to me. We are here to discuss your problems, and possible solutions to them."

"Why deprive yourself from a decent conversation, doctor? The mentally ill do not make good company. Surely you would enjoy an opportunity to talk about more interesting things with someone on your own intellectual level."

He thinks he can trick me into revealing more about myself, that if I open up he can dig through my mind in search of the things I fear most. "I am here by choice, doing this job because I want to help people. I think I understand what you mean, though. Did you enjoy engaging in conversation about your research with your colleagues at Gotham University?"

"'I am here because I want to help people.' Is that your goal in life? Is that why you slave away in this hellhole, risking personal injury and worse at the hands of Gotham's most brutal thugs? What if they cannot be helped? Your life's work would be pointless, rendering you obsolete, a laughing stock."

"Mr. Crane-"

"We all wish to leave a mark on the world, to prove that our lives meant something. I will be remembered for revealing the pettiness of mankind, for showing those fools what fear does to the mind, how it makes them drop the pretention of nobility to cower like witless animals. You will be remembered for your futile struggle to help Arkham's madmen."

"Mr. Crane, if you cannot stay on topic-"

"How do you think it will end for you, doctor? Will the Joker decide to have a bit of fun with you the next time he escapes? Can you imagine Killer Croc's jaws wrapped around your head, ready to squeeze it like a ripe watermelon? Perhaps you fear a fate worse than death. I know of chemical cocktails that can drive a man to permanent madness, leave him a perfect candidate for this dreadful place."

My finger is on the button underneath my desk before I realize what I am doing. I press it. The door opens and the guard enters, looking first to Crane and then myself. "He is not being cooperative. There is no use in continuing this session any further. You may take him back to his cell now."

The guard places his hand on Crane's shoulder and he flinches, eyes still locked on me. "It would be so therapeutic for you, doctor, to face your fears. Let me have it. Prove that you are not afraid of me."

"That's enough," the guard warns.

He rises from his chair, struggling against the guard as he drags him out of the room. He extends a bony hand toward me, teeth bared, eyes narrowed, lost in his sudden outburst of rage. "Give me back my costume! Give it back, you bastard!"

He flails pathetically in the grip of the bigger man. The guard meets my eyes, shrugs, and drags him out of sight. As his screams grow fainter a hyena-like cackle erupts from another part of the asylum.

I rise on unsteady feet and go to the door, closing it for a few moments' worth of quiet. Free to think in peace, I try to decipher what went wrong. The costume has to be the key. There must be some way to use it to get him to let me in, to understand him. I do not dare let him so much as set eyes on it though, for fear he would work himself into a frenzy in his desperation to possess it again.

Perhaps I am going about this all wrong. His attachment to it may be stronger than I anticipated. Maybe if I were to offer him a piece of it- a glove, perhaps, or his hat, it would have a calming effect. I pause in my line of thought to add this possibility to my notes from this session.

I will need to discuss it with my colleagues first. We have never worked with him in costume before due to the aggression and distractibility he shows while wearing it, and there is a chance he will revert fully to his other persona if he wears even a small part of it. I am beginning to wonder, though, if it would not be worth the risk. The confidence it gives him allows him to speak more freely, offering the possibility of prying deeper into his mind.

And what a mind it is, dark and convoluted like a puzzle. He has retreated so deeply that he does not even understand himself anymore, though he claims to have learned more about the human condition than all the staff here put together. Once I get him to see how he has been avoiding his own fears I can begin making true progress.

I catch myself nibbling at the eraser of my pencil as I review the notes for my next patient. I roll up my sleeve and pull back a rubber band set around my wrist, letting the sting of it snapping against my skin remind me of the unprofessional nature of sticking things in my mouth. For every bad habit, there is a way to break a man out of it. For every puzzle of the mind, there is a solution if you are willing to push yourself to uncover it.