Festus: “Turn that goddamned jungle music off and sit down!”
Wagging my whistle, I warned Syndi to return to her chair, but I was reluctant to risk the whistle’s overuse because my patients might habituate to its stimulus. Wally, snapping his fingers, conceded that he found the tune “kinda ketchy, though a mite Jezebellish.” I asked Festus to continue, but more loudly.
“—I feel humiliated!” he seethed above the bass line and drum snares, “violated because the papa-goddamn-razzi are trailing around a bunch of teenybopping costumed incompetents who’re here because our F*L*A*C insists we have to change our image ‘to suit the times,’ forcing us to incorporate mattress-back pop tarts who’re here because they want to be famous, not because they know or care one whit about protecting people or national security or what it means to have fought a war every day for the last forty-five goddamned years of your career while they’re flitting away their mayfly existences preening and prancing around and having their highly publicized perverted little ‘sexcapades’ and publicly dragging the name of this organization through a urinal, making a mockery out of what real heroes—men like Hawk King, women like Iron Lass—have sacrificed!
“I,” he shouted, gripping his chair by the arms so hard his glide-flaps and whiskers shook, “feel furious!”
Stages of Grief: Lust for Vengeance
Festus Piltdown III panted, grimaced, blinked—I couldn’t tell whether from exhaustion or embarrassment. Finally, after regaining his breath, he said simply, “That’s it.”
“Don’t hold back, Squirrelly,” yelled a voice from the ceiling. “You might still have some spleen or pancreas left up in there to spit up—”
“André, please. Let’s positively reinforce Festus’s commendable first foray into self-revelation.”
“And that’s another thing, Miss Brain,” said the Flying Squirrel. “In my day, people didn’t call their elders or their superiors by their first names. One said Mister So-and-so and Miss Such-and-such. Would you go around calling Hawk King ‘Hawk’? No. It’s called respect. Propriety. And maybe if we had a little more of that, our Fraternal Order wouldn’t be swirling down the toilet right now.”
“Can I say something, Eva?” Power Grrrl reverse-rocketed to a stop and raised her hand as if she were a schoolgirl.
“Only if you turn that music down, Syndi.”
She wagged her hips, and the music ceased. “Why is it okay for Mister Piltdown to be sitting there judging us and insulting me? If he wants to be respected, doesn’t he have to, like, treat the rest of us with some respect?”
“Bzzzt for me too, girly!”
I openly fondled my whistle, but, lost in their escalating id-confrontation, my F*O*O*Jsters raged on obliviously. “Treat you with respect?” spat the Squirrel. “I’ll treat you with respect when you goddamn start acting like you deserve some respect! What would Hawk King say if he could see—”
“Festus—Mr. Piltdown, please. Please. Look deeply. You spoke a moment ago about propriety. Don’t we need to model the behavior we wish to have others emulate? Focus on how you feel instead of what other people are doing. That way you can take ownership for your own feelings. Remember, you’re a stockholder in the exchange of your own emotions, but only your own. You can’t control other people.”
The Squirrel crossed his arms, leaned back. “That’s the goddamn problem. These children need controlling!”
Syndi wagged her hips and the music resumed. “I don’t have to take that!”
I blew the whistle.
But nothing happened. As soon as my team realized that they were not paralyzed by behavior-modification migraines, they waded back into their swamp of invective. I raised my voice. “All right, now—which of you did this? Who used their powers on my whistle?”
They met my interrogative with stares of faux innocence.
“I see. Presumably, had only one of you sabotaged my whistle, someone else would have revealed his or her name out of vindictiveness. Since no name is forthcoming, I have to assume all of you attempted to or succeeded in using your powers against my whistle. That’s disappointing. And I’ll have to report that to your F*L*A*C.”
They raised a chorus of objections against me, but none was willing to lay the blame at another’s feet. Either they were all guilty—a bad sign indeed—or they were protecting one of their confederates, which meant there might, indeed, be hope for reducing the toxicity of their interrelationships.
Yet on they raged, led by Kareem. “This is just what we were already facing, times ten!” said the X-Man. “A power struggle! Cept without Hawk King, there’s no ref, the gloves are off, and the brass knuckles are on—”
From behind the furry mask and snub ears: “How dare you incite a riot at a time like this, Edgerton!”
From the buzzing ceiling: “Kreem, dawg, you always stirrin shit, like some Nat Turner–Mandingo plumber!”
“André,” spat Kareem, “I notice you aren’t eating any of the cream-puffs you brought. Afraid of cannibalism?”
“Fuck y’all!”
“André,” I began, “regardless of my whistle’s status, you know the rules about swearing—”
“You see this, Doc?” said Kareem. “Hawk King was the only thing left holding this screwfreak museum together. Now that he’s gone, the kot-tam F*O*O*J is gonna collapse at the precise moment there’s someone out there powerful enough to whack him. Someone lit fire to the house while we were all asleep, an they’re probably staked out across the street for us to start runnin out so they can shoot us down one at a time!”
“Emotions,” I said, standing to face the maelstrom, “are at critical energy, everyone. And I understand that. All of you held Hawk King in the kind of regard in which the public holds you. Right now you’re vulnerable. You’re afraid. You’re passing through the nine stages of the Brain-Silverman Grief Scale™, Revised. And you’re not here by choice but under orders from the F*L*A*C to participate in these sessions. So I understand you’re feeling especially pressured.
“Therefore it’s time now to disengage and reflect, and resume later. You have some choices on how to spend our remaining hours today: in the Id-Smasher®”—a suggestion greeted by groaning—“with Direct Writing time in the Neuro-Demonstrative Cerebiographer®”—more groaning, and louder—“or individual talk sessions with me.”
The groaning ceased instantly, as did Syndi’s music.
While they mumbled their assent to choice 1 or 2, Iron Lass reminded everyone of their duties, including preparation for Monday’s funeral for their fallen founder.
What will it mean for your life, and for your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?
Omnipotent Man: “I feel like a blinded horse with three busted legs.”
Flying Squirrel: “We’ll defend this planet. It’s what the King would’ve wanted.”
Iron Lass: “With the greatest of us gone…glory has no meaning.”
How will you face knowing that you will never exceed, or even equal, the accomplishments of your predecessors?
Brotherfly: “We have no choice. It’s live or be killed, right?”
Power Grrrl: “Same old story. Elders abandon you. I’ll shine without them.”
X-Man: “A world without Hawk King…frightens me. Especially now.”
Facing the Ultimate Archenemy
Nothing is more terrifying than facing the ultimate archenemy, Death, and its horrifying henchman, Grief. Maturity means recognizing the inevitability not only of combating these foes, but of our inevitable defeat at their hands. Even if we live long enough to evade their grasp for a century (or in the case of Iron Lass, two millennia), our reward will merely be to see all of our loved ones cut down one after the other.
Because you are a hero, your identity is based on exceeding limitations; therefore, the awareness of such inescapable defeat is a mental kidney stone that not even you can pass during the urination of your psychemotional processing. Death is a barrier even you can’t smash
down, fly over, phase through, or disintegrate with your maservision. Consequently, dealing with death means invoking the most vile curse word ever to contaminate the tongue of any champion: surrender.
But paradoxically, it is only in surrender that you can achieve victory, for without your acceptance of eventual vanquishment, you will perpetually be running away from reality. As Carl Jung said, avoidance of legitimate suffering is the root of all mental illness. And one truth you must suffer is that everything and everyone you love will eventually die.
Even gods.
No one wants to die feeling they failed to achieve their dreams, or that they failed to employ their powers to their full extent. So free yourself by recognizing that you only thought you wanted those dreams, and that you didn’t fail to live up to your power because you were never really as powerful as you’d made yourself believe…certainly, never possessing the power to cheat death permanently.
Ids, Gods, and Death
Rooted in every sentient being is the id-centered yearning to outshine all others. The fate of anyone with the lust to be such a luminous being—or to employ the ancient name, a Lucifer—is clear.
Even for the most powerful and spectacular heroes, the quest to outshine everyone else will ultimately fail, and for everyone else beneath the paramountcy of power, the mission is a failure before its first sortie.
If all you want is simply to be the best, why not roll up the world’s largest ball of string? If you want to be the best skater, why not break your competitor’s ankles? You could be the world’s most accomplished excretor, entering hot dog–eating championships after consuming a gross of Ex-Lax tablets. Clearly such an aim—merely being “the best”—is empty on its own terms.
But even if victory were possible, it still couldn’t provide meaning or genuine happiness, because saying “I want to be the best” is simply the polite way of saying “I want everyone else to be worse.”
Selfishness is the very heart of your glory, the same impulse which caused the mid-1950s wave of superhero-on-superhero battles to see who was bigger, stronger, or better. Yet not one of those battles to be the brightest produced anything of value (especially not for those heroes’ insurance companies), and every last one of those champions and their comrades has already died or one day will. Even deities like Hawk King.
What you must do is decide how you want to live now. In fear? In rage? In competitive hamster-wheeling? Or in acceptance?
To avoid wasting your remaining time and relationships with ever-more destabilizing distractions, surrender. Surrender to this truth: that a life devoted to scaling the mountain of your own pride does not mean you can build a palace at the peak. Like everyone else, you’ll still have to erect a sod house on the flatlands of your own mere existence…and that, too, will eventually crumble.
Visualizing such an erection can be a powerful means to escape the awful anticipation of your own demise. If you’ve never employed visualization before, go beyond the suggestions of Unmasked! When Being a Superhero Can’t Save You from Yourself and employ the approach I detailed in Secrets from Menton’s Brain: Using Two Lefts to Make Yourself Right (also available on audiobook and holodisc). Your greatest power over emotions such as pride and fear is your imagination. So use it.
But as my F*O*O*Jsters were about to discover, the only path to escaping hubris and mortal terror is deicide.
CHAPTER THREE
Clash of the Icons
SUNDAY, JULY 2, 9:12 A.M.
Voyage into Iron Lass’s Brain
Idols. Gods and goddesses. Icons.
They’re the embodiment of any society’s perspectives on the pinnacle of human achievement. Whether representing beauty, intelligence, strength, science, combat, industry, eroticism, or religion, icons serve as foci of mass attention and mass emulation.
But to the same extent, they serve as implements for mass emasculation. When hyper–role models exist on a plane far higher than we can safely fly, our desperate attempts to touch the hems of their garments will eventually knock us down the staircase of humiliation and into the depths of abasement.
So what happens to one who both is an icon and has an icon, especially when his own icon fails? Can anyone survive the pincering punishment that is the iron mandibles of the Icon Trap?
Icon to Generations
She sat across from me, the only illumination inside the echoing darkness, radiant in her raven-feather hair and flashing amethyst eyes. In one way it was hard to believe that it had been only two days since she learned of the death of Hawk King.
On the other hand, she’d exchanged her electrum-plated iron armor for an elegant black skirt and a mandarin-collared powder blue cardigan, and her ubiquitous black-and-white feathered cloak was hung neatly elsewhere.
But if she was attempting to affect a schule-frau appearance, it wasn’t working; her six-foot-four feminine muscularity couldn’t be contained by pleated wool. In the 1950s, more than one Hollywood scribe compared Lauren Bacall to her. Half a century later, she still looked an athletic thirty-nine when in fact, she’d seen two millennia. Yet by some accounts, she’d changed more during her twentieth-century career than she had over the previous two thousand years.
This woman knew better than almost anyone what it meant to be an icon. Because for centuries, Iron Lass–AKA Dr. Hnossi Icegaard, UCLD professor of Military History, Political Economy, and German and Scandinavian Literature—was literally worshiped as Hnossi of Aesgard, daughter of Queen Frigg of the Norse gods.
Since our sessions began, I’d noted her extreme reluctance to share her feelings; rather she hoarded her words and thoughts in my presence as if they were a mound of Hostess Twinkies and I a projectile bulimic. Hoping for better results that day, I shifted into a new approach as the two of us sat alone inside the temporal lobe of her brain.
“I’m sure that over the last forty-eight hours, Iron Lass, you’ve been reflecting mostly on Hawk King and your relationship with him, probably to the exclusion of pretty much anything else.
“But today, I’d like to touch on an outstanding issue at the core of why you’re here—namely, why are you here?”
Purple lightning crackled overhead along a neural pathway, the synapses pulsating in echoing thunder like throbbing stars.
Hnossi Icegaard revealed nothing but a flicker of one eyebrow.
I remained undeterred.
“Frankly, Hnossi,” I said as the cerebral thunder diminished into distant rumbles, “I’m surprised that the F*L*A*C required you of all the F*O*O*Jsters to attend our sessions.”
Her eyes, like a cobra’s, dilated and scoped on me as if I were a mongoose.
“After all,” I continued, “on several occasions you’ve played the role of lawgiver with your colleagues, unto them, if you will, maintaining order, decorum. Hardly a disruptive behavior, it would seem.”
Her chin tilted up, slowly shifting to the right; her eyes remained locked, like glinting safes.
“Does ziss mean my presence is unnecessary, Frau Doktor? Becoss if so—”
“It means your presence is highly necessary, Professor Icegaard. Necessary for your teammates in providing limits, and necessary in providing a role model. Given all that, why in your opinion would the F*L*A*C suggest you’re a disruptive influence in the F*O*O*J?”
She pursed her lips, maintained her stare at me. “You vud haff to ask zem.”
“You’ve obviously had time to form your own analysis of the F*L*A*C and their decision.”
She was silent. Behind her, the temporal lobe shimmered, but there was no lightning.
“So according to your analysis, what is the F*L*A*C’s rationale for ordering you here? Where have they miscomprehended you and your work?”
“Ze F*L*A*C…unt ze FOOCH itself, fails to unterstandt…ze significance uff self-discipline unt reevaluation…durink difficult times…or uzzervise.”
“And that refers to you how?”
“I haff providedt guidance, Doktor. Guidance zey apparen
tly belief is no lonker reqviredt. Alzough, perhaps now, sadly, in light of Hawk—”
“You’re an icon, Professor,” I said, changing directions again to prevent her clambering into her psychemotional bunker to escape the falling shells of my inquiry. “Not only as a Norse deity and as a twentieth-century superhuman, but in the academy—author of Women Who Fly with the Valkyries, The Frigga Mystique, and The Buri Myth, among others—”
“Ja?”
“You broke down doors, sometimes literally, to gain entrance to traditionally male domains. Dozens of female heroes entered the F*O*O*J because they were inspired by you, and they’ve sung your praises in interviews, books, and the motivational speaker circuit. And, of course, the fact that you’ve been worshiped for centuries—”
“Ja?”
In the northern sky of her brain’s emotional center, blue lightning flashed; the thunder lagged by seconds. I motioned for her to stand and walk with me, which she did, and we headed off toward the nexus of her divine motor function.
“That’s quite a burden,” I said above the thunder finally rolling in, “having to live up to all that. Never being allowed to falter. To be vulnerable.”
“Burtens are a part of life in ziss vurlt. Hawk Kink…taught us all zat.”
“A part of life, yes. You think they’re the entirety?”
“I didt not say zat.”
“A burden you’ve borne for twenty centuries. And now, even with the Götterdämmerung over, you’re still having to hold yourself up as an example of what people can achieve if they have the will and honor, if they’re devoted to what they consider right. It must be…
“Well, I won’t tell you how it feels, but beholding a generation of younger heroes, younger women heroes, who comport themselves as if all the privileges and access they have weren’t fought for and struggled for by the women who preceded them, most of whom never got such opportunities…opportunities that they’re—some would say—squandering? You must find that absolutely galling.”
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