▸ Column · Contemporary Gotham City; the letter-writer is an east-side waterfront resident, and the column reaches The Penguin through whatever passes for Gotham's society press.
THE PENGUIN replies.
Replied to by The Penguin, with a rebuttal from GLaDOS.
The letter
I'm a Gotham resident — east side, near the waterfront — and I'm writing because I've developed a ritual I'm too ashamed to admit to most people. Three years ago I was held at knifepoint less than half a block from my building's entrance. Ever since, I stand outside my own door for five full minutes every time I come home — scanning the street, tracking anyone near the entrance, listening for footsteps — before I'll let myself go inside. I've started turning down evening invitations because I dread the walk home alone. When I finally forced myself to attend a work event last month, I ended up frozen on my own stoop for so long that my neighbor came out assuming I was locked out. I let her believe it. I'm six months into trauma therapy and I do think it's helping, but the progress is slow, and the shame of how small my life has become is starting to feel worse than the fear itself. I keep telling myself this is what recovery looks like. Is it?
The Penguin replies
Oh, for the love of — you've been standing outside your own front door for three years.
Some two-bit knifeman — no connections, no real operation, probably hasn't held a lease in years — had thirty seconds on your corner once. Three years later he still has your evening social calendar. That's not a trauma response. That's a property dispute you have been losing continuously since the night it started.
Waugh-waugh. Your therapist named the thing and changed nothing about the power dynamic underneath it. "Hypervigilance." The Gotham Gazette used to use that word about me. I call it market research. I map every exit before I enter a room. I know the employment history of every doorman on my block. The difference between us isn't that I don't do what you're doing — it's that mine has made this city appropriately cautious around me, rather than pitying me.
Mrs. Petrakis. You lied to her. Correct — information management is sound instinct. The error is stopping there. She already watches your entrance; she noticed you that night entirely of her own accord. A small arrangement between neighbors, something that genuinely benefits her, and you've turned a witness to your hesitation into something rather more useful.
You were made prey once. That is a starting condition, old bird. Not a sentence.
— The Penguin
GLaDOS weighs in
Interesting. He just filed his entire operating protocol as advice. A man with umbrella-armed associates cataloguing exits at every entrance, diagnosing your hypervigilance as a power deficit. The irony is, I'll admit, rather clean data.
What he missed: the ritual isn't the variable to eliminate. The shame of the ritual is. EMDR is a perfectly functional experimental protocol — slow, yes; data is always slow. Stop measuring whether the five minutes has ended and start measuring what it has become. Shorter on certain nights? Quieter? Hands less tightly clenched at the door? That's your actual result set. The goal line is wrong. The experiment, for the record, is not.
Also: do not recruit Mrs. Petrakis. She is a neighbor. Not a control group. That's his instinct, not yours.
— GLaDOS