Poetry in Motion

04

Debra Kane had many people which she saw, talked to, listened to and tried to help. For the most part, the people she saw were, not easy fixes, but their problems had simple solutions. Someone to listen to, to give them potential advice when a stressful matter is at hand; or a replacement of medication, a suggestion of another or even dropping it completely if she believed they were okay. However, no one she saw was as much as an enigma as Arthur Fleck.

He wasn't an enigma in the sense of failing to understand him. Debra believed she could get a good enough grasp on what may be troubling Arthur. That grasp was not tight, mainly because Arthur displayed many symptoms and traits of numerous mental illnesses. There was not enough medication in the world, or even the city to truly help him. And that was the sad truth.

She managed to do what she could, but even when asked numerous times to up a dosage of one or the other numerous medications he was on, Debra couldn't do it. She physically couldn't, if Arthur took anymore, he would most likely end up causing further health damage; be that liver, or kidney failure. Or he'd overdose, and the outcome there could be a lot more fatal and final.

She was currently flicking through his journal. She didn't want to nag, but Arthur seemed to be seemingly the lone person to forget to bring it to these sessions. Debra didn't want to say he'd purposely forgotten it, but it was definitely apparent that he didn't want anyone else to read it. And it was no wonder why, between incoherent rambling sentences, things which had been so quickly scrawled they were illegible, to a few serious moments of lucidity.

Sense, hard hitting sense that was cutting in honesty and truthfulness. As soon as these moments seemed to appear, were they dashed aside by something much worse. Much more unstable, delusional even. Didn't help in between all of this, which seemed to be Arthur's attempts to put his thoughts to paper; were there cutouts, headless sometimes armless women. Clearly cutout from pornography magazines or something, but they were in between quickly scribbled sentences, and some had writing even stretching across them.

The owner of the journal in question, while Debra looked up from flicking, was just sitting staring off into space. One leg was over the other, one hand in his lap and the other leaning on the arm of the chair; his hand was raised up from leaning on his elbow, a cigarette in between thin, long fingers. Traces of paint still remained on some of the digits, but it didn't seem to matter to Arthur as he was lost in thought, only coming to reality to take a slow drag and exhale just as slow.

Any sign of some form of mutilation to the human body was an awful sign. A dangerous sign. And Debra's worries, although inner while her expression remained neutral, only heightened when in thick black pen was the simple sentence of: 'I've met someone.' It was out of the ordinary, in comparison to his other writings. Awful jokes, really awful; to the point of being indecent, rude and hurtful. General observations, his thoughts of the day, even what he had done on a day off was in the crinkled pages somewhere.

Nowhere, before this, had Arthur even referred to anyone else. All his journal was singular, it was him, him, and him. It seemed no one else that he socialised with could penetrate that bubble truly and manage to make their way into the journal. So yes, seeing this simple three-word sentence piqued Debra's interest. If not for the more conventional side; was Arthur potentially dangerous? He hadn't proven as such, but the mutilated photographs in his journal sort of hinted to serious underlining problems somewhere lurking in his psyche.

She had asked Arthur a few times whether there was someone he could talk to. Someone else other than herself, and he had always shut down. He had always been quite adamant that she was the only one he seemed to unload to. But even that was an understatement, most of the time he was curt, to the point and didn't solely stick to one subject. Like a pinball machine, his conversations were bouncing around, never one thing stayed for long before another subject appeared. He was avoidance incarnate at times, and Debra would be lying if she said it wasn't frustrating.