Batman: Your Doctor

Batman: Your Doctor

Indiana

Characters: Scarecrow

Synopsis: His treatment of his patients has always been unconventional.

Your doctor is twenty minutes late for your appointment.  It’s the third week in a row.  He’s wearing plaid.  Wrinkled, as though he’s done so for days.  Slept in it, even.  He looks tired.  You realise he always looks so tired.

He doesn’t look at you when he talks. He doesn’t look at you when you talk. He’s there but he’s not listening. He asks you questions and starts referring them to himself instead of you.

You ask, “Dr Crane, are you alright?”

He snaps at you.  Your psychiatrist’s anxiety is worse than yours is. He continues asking himself questions that he’s directing at you.  You stop answering.  He doesn’t stop asking.

This is not the first time you’ve been afraid of your doctor.

Week four.

Your doctor is late again.  So much so that you’re beginning to wonder if he’s showing up at all.  Where is he? Where has he been, all these weeks? Doesn’t he care?  Doesn’t he care about you?

You eye the door furtively.  You don’t expect him to walk through it.  You know he’s about to walk through it.  He’s not coming.  He’s definitely coming. He didn’t leave his house this morning. He’s outside the door listening, waiting for you to make a mistake.

Five more minutes, then you’ll go.

Five more minutes.

Five more minutes.

Week five.

Your doctor is late again.

You know you should tell someone. Call someone.  But you can’t bring yourself to dial the number on your phone, to ask the secretary downstairs if he’s even been in today, to send an email to the person in charge to get this sorted out.  The only saving grace is that he has never once billed you.  You don’t know if he’s simply been negligent about that too or if he’s doing it on purpose, but whatever the reasoning at least he isn’t charging you for the privilege of sitting in his office as so many before him have done.

Today he is late and you wanted to be too; you wanted to walk in thirty minutes late and to see him sitting there in annoyance, waiting for you and wondering if you were ever going to show, but you were early as usual. Because every time you start to find issue with your doctor and begin to think of what you could do to demonstrate as such, you remember his cold eyes and the seemingly chiseled downward slope of his brows and the shadows set deep into his face, and you once again become afraid of your doctor.  And right now, waiting, you are still afraid, still anxious that he will walk through the door and pin you with that stare and somehow know everything you’re thinking, but for once you’re more angry than afraid.  All right, it’s now blatantly obvious that he doesn’t care. You just wish you knew what the point of stringing you along was!

In one brave second you’ve moved behind his desk, and as your pulse bruises your throat and your fingers struggle to grasp anything you reach for, you search for something, anything that will tell you he’s even been there in the last, countless days since you actually saw the man.  You come across a leather bound book, the kind you might find in the journal section at your local bookstore, and you have trouble with the laces holding it closed for a tense minute.  Once you have laid them aside you stare at the fashionably distressed front cover, trying to catch your breath.  Do you open it?  Would finding out if he ever plans on showing up be worth getting caught, should someone come?  

Your anger and your frustration tell you yes.

Somehow your hesitant fingers guide the cover of the book open, and the first page is quite mundane: the name of your doctor and the month the journal was started, written in cramped and looping script.  You can barely read it, stereotype given life.  You manage to slide a finger under the page and turn it over.  

It appears to detail a session from before you were referred to him; much more than that you can’t make out. The next several pages are denoted similarly, so you gloss over them.  As you continue, the notes become less detailed, the sessions taking up less and less space; the gaps are filled in with scribbled bats and… scarecrows?

The trend goes on: less and less on his sessions and increasing amounts of lopsided drawings and what appears to be chemical formulae; you aren’t sure.  You aren’t sure why they’re in this book at all.  Isn’t he a psychiatrist?  What place could these equations possibly have?

He has no notes on you, you discover. All the pages are meticulously dated in the top left corner, and all he wrote during that session where you related what you were there for was something about ‘annoyances hinder progress’ emphasised with a thick triple underline and yet more drawings of scarecrows and birds and bats.  Nothing about you.  Not one word that you said.  You went there for him to help you, and all the time you were talking he was doing something else.  Something he thought was more important.  

Somehow you still feel as though you don’t have the right to be angry.

You’re sick on the sixth week, and you’re lying in bed with the phone clenched in your fingers and the number of your doctor’s secretary highlighted on the screen, fighting with your swollen throat to make the call.  You know you should call.  You know you probably don’t have to call.  He’s there this time.  Of course he isn’t there.  

The television across the room is droning on about the usual disastrous news in Gotham City; nothing you really want to hear, but that’s the channel you’d flicked to before the TV remote had died.  And you’re staring at it dully, your thumb resting on the plastic case around your phone as you will it to touch the number you need to reach, when you see him. You see your doctor, on the news, his eyes empty and hollow as they seem to bore into yours though he is an unknown distance away, and the headline tells you that a human scarecrow has been caught by the Batman after attempting to spray an aerosol toxin over a packed arena…

You sit up.  

The notebook.  

The scarecrows and the bats and the formulae, they all make sense now.  Your doctor wasn’t missing your appointments because he didn’t care about you.  He was missing your appointments because he was crazy.

Or… or was he.

All those hours you spent wasted in his office, waiting for him to show up, he was… doing this.  Becoming this.  Becoming more.  Was it crazy?  Could a psychiatrist be crazy?  

Or is he brilliant?

Maybe what he’s done is all you have to do.  All you have to do is look at your problems in the mirror until you get used to the face of them, break them down and tear them up until you know them so intimately that they could never possibly bother you again.  

To solve your problem… you must become it. You must become your problem to the elimination of all else, because that is the only way to prove you have control over it.  And in this way, one could say that the problem still had power over you, but you know better; you have power over it.

You had nothing to fear from him after all.  He wasn’t avoiding you, he was helping you help yourself!  And now you can, and now you will, and it is all thanks to your doctor.

Author’s note