Arkham Daily Life (Part 2)

When Jack lay down on a bed at Arkham Asylum again, Schiller said with undisguised glee, "Now you know where your forever home is, right? Since you paid so much, I can prescribe you some extra painkillers."

"Do you think I’m some junkie?" Jack shouted irritably. "Don’t compare me to those brain-fried drug addicts!"

"Look on the bright side. At least you have a permanent bed here. You’ve probably seen how badly those mob bosses stuck outside want one like it."

At the mention of mob bosses, Jack made a disgusted face. He muttered, "You’re just like that bat. He doesn’t want to laugh, and you don’t want to be crazy. You’re both lying to yourselves…"

He stared at the ceiling and rambled on. "Why are you all so serious? Why won’t you admit it? Why aren’t you proud of your chaos and disorder?"

Then, suddenly, he calmed down. With something almost philosophical in his tone, he said, "In such a mediocre world, having a mad soul unlike any other should have been something to take pride in."

"But you always trap such an astonishing soul inside a body so mediocre it makes me sick."

"Living every day with such solemn seriousness, pretending to be no different from those walking corpses… It disgusts me."

"Madness isn’t the only way to understand this world." Schiller sat down as well, his tone calm. "I’ve always believed that."

"If you can’t become a sharp blade and use insanity to pierce the world’s disguise, then you’ll be tamed by that hypocritical order."

As if speaking in a dream, Jack uttered several abstruse words. Each one lingered on his tongue, as though he did not recognize them, yet every sentence was complete and fluid.

"Only with order can there be disorder. Without order, chaos would no longer be chaos. Chaos would become order. When you destroy order, you are creating another kind of order."

"Many people think chaos is the ultimate answer to this world, but the moment they have that thought, it means they’ve already been tamed by order. This world has no ultimate answer."

"And that’s why you and that bat would rather do nothing?" Jack looked at Schiller.

"There is still a slight difference between him and me." Schiller poured himself a glass of water. "Batman is a warrior who preserves order amid chaos, but I’m not. I’m just an ordinary person."

"An ordinary person…" Jack scoffed at that.

"And you see yourself as a savior. You want to tell everyone that only madness can reveal every truth. More than anyone, you want Batman to know that the answers he seeks are right in front of him, so simple that all he needs to do is laugh."

"But it’s not that he doesn’t understand. He just doesn’t want to do it."

"That’s why I think he’s insane." A trace of jealousy suddenly entered Jack’s voice. "He has what I don’t. He has that most fundamental darkness and madness that I dream of, yet he refuses to embrace it. He could become a great god who tears apart this mediocre lie, but he just won’t laugh."

"That question echoes in my mind every day, leaving me confused and driven mad."

"Why are they all so serious?"

Schiller shrugged. "Everyone is lying to themselves. Only you tell the truth. Everyone is putting on a serious face. Only you laugh out loud. So you became the only Joker."

Jack gazed at the ceiling. "When laughter is about to spill from their mouths, their first reaction is fear, resistance, self-reflection. That’s what madness is."

"Being a Joker must be wonderful, because there’s nothing in this world you can’t laugh at. You want them to know how happy you are, but sadly, no one ever appreciates it."

"I’ve always thought that anyone dressed as a bat is insane." Jack looked at Schiller. "…And so is anyone dressed as an ordinary person."

Outside the window, night slowly fell over Gotham, and the city lights flickered to life. As the weather warmed, the entire city began to stir with renewed vitality—still somewhat mad and evil, still utterly chaotic, and still bustling and prosperous.

In the morning, Schiller stood in his office holding a paintbrush. Beside him, Brand removed a glove covered in paint with some distaste. Schiller said to him, "I’m certain this lousy hospital needs a complete renovation."

Pointing at the corner of the wall, he said, "If that madman’s graffiti hadn’t damaged my wall, I wouldn’t have noticed that the gaps between the bricks there had cracked. It might collapse one day."

Brand sighed. "You have a point, but this needs a long-term plan. We can’t exactly tell the patients that renovations start tomorrow and they should all get lost, can we?"

He looked up at the corner near the ceiling. "In any case, for now, we can only do it ourselves."

"You just can’t bear to lose the income from these days." Schiller smiled. "If the renovations take two months, you won’t get any commissions during that time. That would be quite a loss, wouldn’t it?"

Brand rubbed his nose and cursed under his breath. "It’s all because of that damned mob business chain you set up. I never knew money could be this easy to make. If we shut down for two months, how much would I lose?"

"Fine, then we’ll do it ourselves. But cracks in the walls are minor problems. The biggest problem is that we don’t have enough rooms."

Brand sighed as well. He clearly knew that.

Arkham Asylum had a long history. When the building had first been constructed, Gotham did not have such a large population, and the hospital’s capacity was limited. Even though Schiller had created a grand cycle of medical parole and prison parole, rooms were still in short supply.

The principal contradiction at Arkham Asylum was now between its outdated facilities and the mob bosses’ ever-growing need to make money.

After Gotham’s disaster, that contradiction had become even more apparent. The logistics infrastructure was still being rebuilt, and most mob bosses had nothing to do. What place could be better than the Arkham Club?

Here, they reorganized their businesses, exchanged resources, formed circles, expanded their connections, and prepared for the next stage of development.

Everyone exchanged what they had and shared information, advancing layer by layer through different social circles. If you did not hurry up and join now, then once work truly resumed, you would not even get a sip of soup.

Especially after Jack returned to the asylum, he proved to be an exceptionally troublesome fellow. Cobblepot, Evans, and Jack could be said to be utterly incompatible.

Cobblepot and Evans could barely remain in the same room, but that became impossible whenever Alberto emerged. Whenever the future Penguin Cobblepot and Joker were in the same room, their wildly different values often led them to come to blows.

Cobblepot belonged to Gotham’s lawful evil camp. Simply put, he was not crazy enough. In fact, the Penguin from the original story was much the same: running a fine restaurant, chatting and laughing with mob bosses, even becoming mayor. It was a promotion path so normal by Gotham standards that it became abnormal, completely unlike Joker’s chaotic evil.

Thus, Cobblepot considered Joker a complete lunatic who could not be reasoned with, while Joker considered Cobblepot an idiot no different from all those mob bosses. Spending even one more second around him was an insult.

Cobblepot could not be bothered to reason with a madman, and Joker was too lazy to waste words on an idiot, so their way of resolving disputes was to fight.

Neither of them was particularly strong. Cobblepot was small and thin, with little strength, while Joker was so crazy that he fought without any method. Every time, they somehow fought to a draw, ending up bloodied and tied to hospital beds while glaring at each other.

Joker and Evans, meanwhile, had enormous differences in their understanding of art. The two mostly argued, since Evans did not particularly enjoy hitting people, while Jack could not beat Evans at all. Their arguments eventually became contests of bellowing opera excerpts at each other.

If Evans’s singing could still be considered pleasant, then Jack’s singing was bad enough to knock Batman over if he heard it in person.

Whenever the two shared a room, letters complaining about noise and disturbance flooded Schiller’s office like snowflakes.

So the three of them could only have one room each.

There were already too few rooms, and these three patients, who generated no profit at all, insisted on occupying one each. Schiller had been fed up with them for a long time, but all three had legitimate reasons.

Cobblepot had been stabbed several times by Evans before. He was genuinely badly injured, and making him leave the hospital now would be somewhat inhumane.

The conflict between Evans and his father had not been fully resolved. Alberto adamantly refused to return to Falcone Estate, and the Godfather showed no intention of taking his son back, so things could only drag on.

Jack had nothing to do because Batman was busy attending classes, and Gordon’s mental health and work pressure also had to be considered, so he could only continue mooching here.

One afternoon, just after Schiller had finished lunch, Jack stood on the balcony of the seventh floor of Arkham Asylum with one foot over the railing.

Inside the room, Bruce, Evans, and Cobblepot stood together. Evans said to Jack, "Let’s talk this out. Can you come back over here first? If you fall, the professor will definitely get angry."

Bruce had only come to meet Evans and hand over club work. He had no idea about the various heart-stopping incidents that had occurred at Arkham Asylum recently, so he turned to Evans and asked, "What exactly is going on? Why is he trying to jump?"

"Can’t you tell?" Cobblepot sat on a hospital bed nearby and said to Bruce, "He’s a madman. He’s having an episode."

Evans continued trying to persuade Jack with painstaking patience. "This is the seventh floor. If you fall like that, your head will definitely hit first. Your brains and blood will dirty a huge patch of ground, and the professor will have to pay a large cleanup fee. He’ll definitely be angry."

Cobblepot added, "The ground below is paved with stone bricks. Blood is difficult to clean out of the cracks, so they’d have to pry up every single brick. If you really dare to do this, I have no doubt he’ll give you a funeral dripping with the stink of money."

An unexpectedly troubled expression appeared on Jack’s face. "Would he carry my coffin into the middle of a crowd of mob bosses and make them recite mournful eulogies for me? Have you, you idiot, lay flowers for me? Have that person with no taste in music sing hymns for me? Oh God! He’s a devil!"

"But do you think I’ll be afraid?!" Jack slammed the railing hard and declaimed like an aria, "Brave Jack fears no devil! I’ll prove it to you right now—I am the Arkham Knight!"

With that, he leaned hard to the left and fell straight down. Bruce rushed to the balcony in two strides, only to see Jack floating in midair as Schiller, standing below, extended One Hand and flung him aside with an irritated expression.

After landing, Jack rolled around laughing nearby. "Hahahahahaha! An ordinary person, you said you’re an ordinary person! Hahahahahaha! That joke is too funny! I have to hear it again tomorrow! Hahahahahaha!"

Evans turned to look at the calendar, then glanced at Cobblepot. "Want to make a bet? Will this be the fifteenth time this week?"

Cobblepot stood and walked out, intending to return to his room. "I bet it’ll definitely be more than twenty."

Only Bruce remained standing on the balcony. He looked back at Evans and Cobblepot, then down at Schiller and Jack. The wind on the balcony tousled his hair as he muttered softly to himself:

"…Am I the crazy one?"

Hehe.