She drew in a huge breath through her nostrils, but even with her mouth closed I could hear her teeth grinding against one another as if she were chewing the metallic sweetbreads of the mythic iron goat Scyldscrotgnashhunt.
We were close.
Iconsternation: Iron Lips
I aimed my neuron probe up into the cerebral “sky” of memory, the zone to which my Id-Smasher® had mapped and routed the segments of Hnossi’s actual flesh-and-ichor brain.
Inside her virtual cerebrum, the sky warbled at my neuron probe’s beam. I then tapped a sequence on my belt controls, stimulating the sensory-memory lobe, and around us IMAXed the remembered sights, smells, sounds, and wind-rushing tactile impression of flying over snow-clutched Scandinavian mountain peaks. Neurally connected to her as I was, I felt the strain at my shoulders of wings surging through the stratosphere, felt the cold rush across my body.
“Your other powers,” I said, aiming my probe elsewhere, “include the ability to summon this, correct?”
Instantly we were standing in a bald, gray valley; a gleaming iron chariot appeared, connected to a train of tiger-sized iron cats. I clicked again: across the sky, we looked down at two massive projections of Hnossi’s hands, into which materialized her two magic iron swords, one short, one long.
“Iron chariot; iron cats; iron swords. You can turn your wings into iron, you can occasionally turn your body into iron, you have gold-and silver-plated iron armor, your name is—”
“Your point, Doktor?”
“That’s a lot of iron, Hnossi. You tell me. What’s the point?”
“Mm, ja,” she sneered. “Don’t you sink zat’s just a bit too…mm…precise, Frau Doktor? Too purfectly pat unt pristine? Zat my carryink uff iron implements unt various transformations viss iron connote a hardness or hard-heartedtness uff my character, Freudianly suggestink furzer some sort uff pursonal or family dysfunction?”
“I didn’t say a word about your family, Professor Icegaard.”
She stiffened, blinking at me, looking like a sleeping cockatoo whose perch had suddenly collapsed beneath her.
“But the way you reacted to my question, Hnossi, is interesting. Have you found in your career or your mothering that shame is an effective means of silencing people when they question you or your decisions?”
Her lips flattened like spatulas, her eyes nailed onto me like eviction notices. The giant projection of hands and swords flared and then turned to black smoke, while the entire sky erupted in flame.
The two of us stood crisping in the violent orange light of the inferno. But because I refused to look away from her face, Hnossi finally spoke.
“Vell, first uff all, you’re mistaken ven you say—it’s inaccurate to, totally incorrect to suggest zat I—zat I shame people, Doktor, vezzer professionally or pursonally. Unt even if, unt I punctuate if, vut I said to you vuss ‘shaming,’ zen zat’s only becoss zat’s vut you’d just been doingk to me!”
“Why are you choosing to think I was trying to shame you?”
“You, you just—you vere just tryink to somehow make me feel ashamedt uff my ferric powers! Vich I’ve been using for centuries in your vurlt, savink people like you, people who caun’t take care of zemselfs!”
“So you admit that you did try to shame me as retaliation for what you perceived as me shaming you, and you just attempted to shame me again by saying people like me can’t take care of themselves.”
The firestorm emitted what can only described as a confused light, diminishing into vast, belching fields of smoke which I waved away with my hands. Hnossi removed her mandarin-collared powder blue cardigan, and from her back her wings emerged in a burst of snow and black ash. Standing, she flapped her vast black falcon wings to clear our air.
“So in which ways, do you think,” I said, coughing, “has this belief of yours that two wrongs make a right led to professional or personal problems for you?”
She sat agape, finally squeaking out, “I caun’t belief your shoddy, scattershot, disjointed—you’re not even listeningk to me! I don’t haff any professional or pursonal proplems!”
“Not even denial?”
“So if I defendt myself against untrue accusations, I’m in denial?”
“You’re divorced—”
An image of her ex-husband, the Mexican superhero Strong Man, in his cape, mask, and wrestling tunic, glimmered behind her. He smiled broadly. “Yes I am, as are about a hundred million uzzer vimmen viss soughtless husbands in ziss country—”
“You’ve been sent to therapy with me—”
An array of caricatures—dwarfish versions of the F*L*A*C officers—sprouted from the “floor” like toadstools. “Because an assembly of scaredt, jealous, foolish, myopic untermenschen on ze F*L*A*C is afraid of vut I represent unt how tiny zey feel ven zey’re forced to evaluate zeir own lifes in comparison to—”
“You’re estranged from your children, Hnossi.”
Her mouth stopped. Shut.
A wall of hewn stone appeared behind her, soaring back left, right, and upward, and with a thunder-smack concluded its construction as an impenetrable fortress.
From behind narrowed eyes, she said, “You don’t know ennysing about my children.”
“Tell me.”
“I come from a culture, a generation, zat said private matters are private. Unt ve do not discuss our problems viss just vutever professional gossip-junkie happens to troll ze back alleys looking to…to score.”
“But you just said you didn’t have any personal problems.”
Her eyes snapped open, her lips opening for a breath. But if she had a sentence waiting to fly, she never surrendered its passport. By then, Hnossi Icegaard was beginning to see that neither my office nor the Id-Smasher® permitted the use of denial as an avoidance technique.
“Prove me wrong,” I said. “If you don’t have any personal problems, then tell me about your children, why your emotional-memory center has metaphored a psychic fortress around any image of them, and why your not seeing them doesn’t indicate or constitute a problem.”
“Ve’re not estrangedt! Ve see each uzzer all ze time!”
“When was the last time you had a meal together? Actual family time, sitting around the table for roasted wild boar, tankards of Jotun ale, recitations from the Poetic Edda?”
“Please spare me your painfully passetic attempts at cultural sensitivity, Doktor.”
“So. When was it? The last time?”
She looked to her left, looking “east,” and the glittering Bifrost rainbow bridge raced up toward the mountain rising from the black plains of memory. At its peak glittered into existence the silver and golden meadhalls of Aesgard.
I ignored her attempt to hide in her “happy place.”
“Married to, let’s see,” I said, clicking a projection of my IRON LASS file after Hnossi’s prolonged refusal to speak, “married May 1962 to Hector ‘Qetzalcoatl’ El Santo, HKA Strong Man.” The life-size smiling image of the caped-and-tunicked hero and Mexican screen idol reappeared beside Hnossi. She moved closer to it as if automatically, then forced herself to step back and look away.
“Two children: Inga-Ilsabetta, born October 1962, and Baldur, nicknamed Lil Boulder, born June 1964.”
A tall girl and a shorter boy, both dark-haired, appeared at Strong Man’s hips. Both looked up toward their father with the power of the sun in their smiles.
“Separated from El Santo, 1974; children chose to live with their father. El Santo eventually filed for divorce in 1981.”
The family triad diminished into blackness and disappeared. I paused, looking at the woman staring at the fading footprints of shadows.
“Later that year, you drafted a paper entitled Toward a Practical Götterdämmerung: A Logistical Analysis, ghost-rewritten and repackaged to the public as the paperback bestseller Time to Ragnarok! It became the clarion call that initiated the War.”
I glanced away from my file projection to see Iron Lass’s eyes attempting t
o carve me into individual slices of luncheon meat.
“The same year your husband tells you that your marriage is truly finished, you, essentially single-handedly, declare a global war that changes the planet. A war whose logistics you chart. A war you lead to victory.”
“Ziss is absurdt,” she said, her left hand glowing white, her right hand shadowing into black. “Vut ridiculous, patronizing, reductionist nonsense, to claim an entire geopolitical hyperhominid conflict can be explainedt avay as merely a vuman scornt?”
“To go from leading your fellow Valkyries into battle for centuries, being literally worshiped as a deity of iron—to opening yourself up to simple, mortal love, meaning you’d’ve had to’ve made yourself soft and pliant and vulnerable to humans, bearing children for a mortal man, even…and then after all of that, to be rejected? That’s iconoclasm, Hnossi! The shattering of an icon…you!
“So rather than being ‘patronizing’ or ‘reductionist,’ I’m trying to get you to integrate everything you’ve gone through into a postwar logistical analysis of yourself.”
Her eyes, aflame, dimmed; her body, rigid, melted by a degree. Her hands resumed their normal state, no swords having appeared in them.
“My muzzer,” she finally muttered, “alvays saidt to me, she saidt, ‘Brünhilde, you’re too smart by half.’ ” She lowered her voice further. “She never remembert my name.”
What will it mean for your life, and for your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?
Iron Lass: “I never sought glory. Basic respect would suffice.”
Iconditional Love
Blobs of Day-Glo color oozed and swirled around me as if I were standing inside a giant lava lamp, and the air smelled like a mixture of bubble gum and the cosmetics department at a Target store.
“So, Syndi,” I asked the only other person with me inside the Id-Smasher®’s neuroscape, “how do you feel about the F*L*A*C ordering you into counseling?”
“Like, as far as I’m concerned,” said the young pop star, once again and in quick succession yawning, stretching, snapping her virtual gum, and rolling her eyes, “everybody should be in counseling.”
Power Grrrl had manifested from her memories the leather sofa from my Verbalarium and had draped herself across it, her back wedged into one of its corners, one thigh hiked up over the sofa’s arm, her hair dazzled along the sofa’s back as if she were awaiting her paparazzi. Mentally clad in black-and-silver leather dominatrix garb and swaying her torso to the dance beat seeping from her bustier-speakers, she was, that day, unusually low-key.
“Tell me about that, Syndi. Why should ‘everybody be in counseling’?”
“Isn’t it obvious, Eva? These F*O*O*J-feebletons really need you, and one day I’m sure, like, they’ll thank you?” she said in her usual question-intonation, smiling sugar all over me. “But just look at the world, you know? Everyone’s, like, crazy—all this negative energy they’re beaming? These F*O*O*J-fogies need to fix themselves before they start invading everyone else’s proximity, you know? Gawd!”
“So you think they’re being hypocritical, Syndi?”
“Like, yeah!”
“Aren’t superheroes supposed to be involved? Helping others?”
“How’re you supposed to help people if you should really be under round-the-clock observation on a coupla hundred meds?”
“You seem to get along fine with the Brotherfly.”
“P-Fly? He’s cool,” she said, while behind her drifted an image of the Brotherfly gazing at her adoringly. “He knows how to have fun. He’s not afraid to live, y’know? The others, like, need to get over themselves. ‘Legendary heroes’? Right!”
“Not even Omnipotent Man?”
Brotherfly disappeared, replaced by an Omnipotent Man half his correct size, and old beyond his years. “Just a sad old man who’s, like, totally lost in his own rep.”
“The Flying Squirrel?”
Omnipotent Man disappeared, replaced by the image of an actual flying squirrel wearing a black top hat sitting atop a pile of virtual money and screeching. “Just an angry old tightass who can’t deal.”
“Deal with…?”
“My orientation?”
“Yes. Let’s discuss that momentarily. And X-Man?”
She paused a moment with a look on her face that suggested she was chewing a uniquely dreadful species of sushi. The top-hatted squirrel was replaced, oddly, by an image of herself wearing a white shirt, black suit, and tie. The image appeared to be gasping for breath before it disintegrated.
“Gawd,” she said, “he’s, like, the most uptight of all of them. Everything’s about race for him. He seriously needs your help, Eva. Like, if he didn’t have his job and his politics and his religion, he wouldn’t even have an identity!”
“And how about Iron Lass?”
She stopped her sofa-swaying, looking at me for the first time, while above us towered a giant, rusting iron-fleshed Iron Lass like a Norse Statue of Liberty, glowering down from the clouds with such intense disappointment that the virtual ground beneath us split open.
Rolling her eyes, Syndi blew a bubble. Made it larger.
Larger still.
Popped it.
She sucked it back inside her mouth and chewed.
She rotated the twin volume knobs on each cup of her bustier. The thump-bump pumped louder, and only then did I recognize the song—one of her hits from the previous summer: “Thong Power.”
“She’s just a depressed, tired, worn-out, broken old woman, Eva,” said Syndi, getting up from the couch and amble-dancing around the discotheque that had sprung up around us to shield us from the iron giantess. Syndi glanced at numerous mirrors and portraits of herself, then examined objets d’art and bookshelves her memory had manifested here from my office. She pulled books halfway out of their slots on my shelves, glancing at them before leaving them.
“She’s always daggering me with her eyes, always making these, like, snide remarks about how I dress, about my relationships with, like, Cathode Girl and Billi Biceps and Beast Mistress…saying I don’t have any focus or purpose or direction…I mean, who does she think she is? My, like, mother?” She snorted. “I already have one of those, and she supports me every step of the way!”
Beside her, a full-size Bianca appeared, a woman in her late forties, overtanned and leather-skinned, wearing a bustier and white pants that would be called chic on a woman two decades younger.
“Yes, I remember after that openmouthed kiss with Media Medea on the Golden Tunic Awards on ABC. There was a lot of controversy. Your mother backed you completely.”
“Yeah. Bianca’s cool,” she beamed.
“You call your mother by her first name?”
“Like, why not? We’re not hung up with society’s ‘rules.’ Plus she’s like not only my best friend, she’s my agent. She got me into the F*O*O*J, got me my Sony deal. If old Iron Ass wants to be someone’s mother, maybe she should start with her own kids?” My bookshelves disappeared, replaced by a floating array of gold and platinum records—Syndi’s, I assumed. “I hear neither of them even talk with her…I even heard one of her kids even tried to like kill herself or something? Some role model. Iron Gash could like learn something from Bianca. Gawd! I hope you can help her out…for her kids’ sake, if no one else’s.”
“I noticed, in the simulation against CycloTron, you and Iron Lass certainly seemed to clash. And you never speak to each other in front of me.”
“Like, I just told you? She hates me.”
“Well, Syndi, I’ve certainly never gotten the impression she—”
“No, she hates me, Eva, I’m telling you?”
“Don’t you think you might exag—”
“She disapproves of me intensely, then? Happy now?”
“What’s interesting to me is how much you two are alike.”
She spun back around to face me.
“You have got to be, like, riffing.”
“No, Syndi, I’m not
‘riffing.’ Look…you’re both icons to women. You’re both symbols of femininity and feminine power. From the 1940s through the 1980s, Hnossi inspired women superheroes and ordinary women to break into male-dominated professions and stand up for themselves, and now you’re inspiring a generation of young straight and nonhetero-sexual women and girls to believe in themselves, to be proud. Surely you can see the connection.”
“We’re like totally different! She’s all like ‘Do it zis vay’ and ‘Diknity! Honor! Sacrifice!’ It’s all about trying to get everyone to be just like her!”
“But Syndi, what about your HEAT Ray?”
She gaped indignantly. “That’s like totally not the same!”
“You used it in the Id-Smasher® simulation. You’ve used it in the small number of melees you’ve been in during your brief crimefighting career, and you even use it in your concerts. Your…what’s it called, now? Hyper-Emulation—”
“Acquisition Transmission Ray, yeah, yeah—”
“Syndi, you turn people into duplicates of yourself. Literally. And literally under your control. Not to mention your highly successful line of Power Grrrl’s Grrrl Guides™…Power Grrrl’s Grrrl Guide™ to Yoga, Power Grrrl’s Grrrl Guide™ to Diamond-Hard Abs, Power Grrrl’s Grrrl Guide™ to Buddhism, the Grrrl Guide™ to Yoga Writing the LSAT—”
“So I know something about marketing. With all your books and videos, Eva, I’d think you of all people could appreciate that!” Suddenly the discotheque reformatted itself into what must have been a Barnes & Noble, to judge by the wafting smell of lattés.
Syndi wandered off, disappearing amid all the shelves of her own CDs, DVDs, PG! magazines, and books. Just before I located her again, I finally found copies of something other than her work: a battered hardcover of Professor Icegaard’s Toward a Practical Götterdämmerung: A Logistical Analysis, and a few copies of my own self-help series. They were on the remainders table.
Minister Faust Page 7
