At that moment, he received a call from Constantine, saying there was a problem with Batman. He seized this opportunity to make an exit.
Arriving where Bruce was, Gordon was just as shocked by Bruce's current state, seeing the potential consequences of Batman's madness more clearly than Constantine.
So, he quickly grabbed Bruce's shoulder, saying, "Bruce! Look at me, it's James, we can talk, really..."
As he held onto Bruce's shoulder, he noticed Bruce's body shivering. Gordon listened closely, he even seemed to hear uncontrollable laughter coming from Bruce's chest.
Gordon had a bad feeling, he covered his forehead and said: "Jesus! What on earth is going on? Is that lunatic behind this?!"
Suddenly, Bruce lifted his head, looking at him and asked, "I gave you the Bat Light, but why have you hardly ever used it?"
"I..." Gordon hesitated for a moment and then said, "I don't want to lie to you. The fact is, the Bat Light is a very good lamp. It has a high wattage and can illuminate the entire police station yard. So, I bolted it onto the rooftop behind the police station..."
Upon saying this, Gordon quickly added, "However, it is still functional where it is, just by adjusting the angle, the bat-shaped light can be projected into the Gotham skyline..."
"The reason I haven't always been using it is because I know you're very busy." Gordon sighed and said, "Let's stop playing guessing games and be honest. Wayne has to run Wayne Enterprises, Bruce has to go to school, Bruce Wayne has to raise children and educate them, Batman has to fight crime..."
"I really don't know what time to reach out without interrupting you. Unless it's really troublesome, I'm reluctant to resolve problems in this way."
Bruce looked up at him, sensing that Gordon wasn't telling the whole truth. At that point, Gordon turned to look at Constantine, who shrugged and said, "You two go ahead and talk, I need to lie down somewhere, I feel terrible."
After saying this, Constantine turned around and walked away. Gordon then sat on the curb, stating, "Since I got promoted, I realized that the lack of action by the Gotham Police Department isn't solely because of insufficient firepower."
"There are three kinds of people who join the police force in Gotham: one kind is the ruthless villains. They join the police force to make money, they are placed there by their bosses for convenience. If someone else gives them money, they will happily help some criminals get away."
"The second kind are ordinary people who see policing as just a job. They show up when called, solve problems based on luck, and take money when it's offered. They handle issues if they aren't too troublesome, believing that all the evil acts will eventually resolve themselves without their efforts."
"And the last kind, just like my colleague Brock, appear to be corrupt cops on the surface, often taking money from the mob but in reality, they are good people. They solve many problems in their own way, doing their best to uphold justice…"
"What about you?" Bruce asked.
"Me?... They call me a madman." Gordon looked up at the sky and said, "Indeed, in this city, I am a madman. I don't take dirty money, don't do favors for the mob. Whenever someone calls the police, I try my best to solve the problem, even at the cost of my own safety and life."
"At first, I was enraged. How could they call me a madman? It is they who are out of their minds, they who have sunk into evil. Only I have not been tainted by the mud. But later, I realized that being a madman in Gotham is not necessarily a bad thing."
Bruce's gaze moved, looking quizzically at Gordon, seemingly not understanding why he would say such a thing.
In his mind, Gordon was the last moral conscience in Gotham. You could expect nothing good from anything that happened here but you could always trust Gordon.
"One day, I got entangled in a highly complex mob conflict. Everyone in the station, even the intern who had only been here for three days, was urging me to turn a blind eye and make less out of more."
"Then, I drove an armored police car to the mansion. Brock, who was driving, pointed a rocket launcher at one of the mansion's windows. I took a rifle and entered the place where the mob bosses were negotiating."
"I told them that I needed the truth, or else we'd all die there. Apart from me, none of them were innocent and I was in voluntarily."
"They all claimed I had gone mad," Gordon squinted at the neon lights across the street and said, "They were all taken aback, calling me a madman."
"They started blaming each other, claiming it was the other's fault that they had provoked me, the madman. Finally, they identified the real culprit behind the scenes, shot him dead on the spot and one of the mob bosses had me returned to the police station in his car. They told the police chief that the Godfather shouldn't have let a madman become a detective."
"You see." Gordon spread his hands and sighed, "In this city, to stop evil, you can't be a good man, you have to be a madman."
Gordon took a deep breath, stood up, bent stiffly over his knees and looked at Bruce saying:
"Batman, don't consider yourself the only sane person in this city, because we all know, there is no sane person here."
Gordon looked at Bruce, his eyes filled with a sense of unspeakable hope, as if he was seeing his younger self. He continued:
"I refuse to use the Bat Light to find you, not because I doubt your resolve to fight crime, or think you're unhelpful, but because if you see yourself as a sane person, you can't deal with these lunatics."
"Don't feel ashamed of being mad. Only when you are madder than all of them, can you defeat them."
Sitting in the same spot, Bruce thought about the fire he had seen, where he saw a reality madder than Joker.
Batman had always considered himself sane while the laughing Joker was the real madman.
But now, Bruce realized that no one could escape the madness in this reality. During his years of dreaming about revenge, he had been influenced by the madness, blinded by it.
The perennial rain here treated everyone the same. If you think you're not crazy, you probably already are.
Bruce questioned, if he couldn't be sure of his sanity, on what grounds could he deal with the criminals? How could he save Gotham?
Facing this question, Gordon didn't have the answer. He wasn't great at philosophical reasoning and could only advise Bruce based on his own experiences.
But he knew someone who was good at this, so he dialed Harvey Dent, Bruce's good friend and mentor.