▸ Column · Modern Gotham noir — a trauma survivor who fled the city after a break-in, writing in to the Dark Knight
BATMAN replies.
The letter
Three years back, the man in the apartment above mine picked my lock and came in while I slept. He's in Blackgate now — convicted, still serving — and it changed nothing about my nights. I still throw the deadbolt fifteen, twenty times before I can even consider lying down. I scraped together enough to leave Gotham for a ground-floor place in a new city, thinking distance would do it. Instead I run criminal-record searches on every neighbor within four doors of me, and I've taken to sleeping with a kitchen knife under the pillow — which I know is far likelier to cut me than save me. My therapist calls it hypervigilance, says the rituals are my nervous system doing its best. Fine. It still feels like I'm paying $1,400 a month to be a prisoner in my own home. Does a person ever actually trust they're safe again — or do they just get better at hiding the fear?
Batman replies
He is in Blackgate. The lock did its work years too late, and the law did the rest. So be precise about what you are guarding against now. It is not him. It is the part of you he taught never to sleep.
Fear is not the enemy. I know this. A boy fell into a cave under his own house once, and a thousand bats came up out of the dark at him. He spent the rest of his life becoming the thing in the dark instead of the thing afraid of it. That is mastery. What you describe is not. Twenty checks on a deadbolt is not security. It is the fear wearing your hands.
Remove the knife tonight. At three in the morning it comes out in someone's grip, and the odds it is yours, turned against you, are bad. Replace ritual with competence. One lock you trust, so you check it once. Two exits walked in daylight. A plan you need not rehearse because you know it.
You will not feel safe. Safety is a feeling, and feelings lie. You will become someone the fear cannot run. That ground holds. Nothing else does.
— Batman
Catwoman weighs in
Sugar, take it from someone who's known Bruce a long, long time: never ask a man who's still wearing his worst night as a cape how to take yours off. He just hands you a sturdier lock and calls it healing.
Here's what he won't say. Your burglar's the one in a cell. You're the one still doing the time — $1,400 a month, in a cage you built and furnished yourself. Stop casing the neighbors. They aren't the job. Go out. Stand somewhere with no exits mapped and live through it anyway. And get a cat. We hear everything coming, and we never once make you check the deadbolt twice.
— Catwoman
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