“It’s, uh, the word you’ve chosen,” I said, swallowing. “Tell me why.”
She stared at me with her cold eyes of hot fury, a look that made me feel like a mouse crisping in a child’s Easy-Bake oven. The song on her Q-bot, meanwhile, changed to Patsy Cline’s pathetically innocent rendition of “Tennessee Waltz.” The juxta-position only intensified my anxiety.
She continued staring at me, unblinking, unmoving, until the second verse in which Patsy lilted, “Only you know how much…I have lost…”
I finally broke our gaze, flipping through my file until I found another angle to pursue.
“You’re, um, highly lauded, not only among, uh, the public, but, ah, among F*O*O*J members. As a symbol of the very best in superheroism. Since the F*O*O*J’s founding, you’ve enjoyed the highest consistent approval rating among civilians and heroes of anyone except for Hawk King and Omnipotent Man. Ball Buster said in a 1989 issue of People that if it weren’t for you, she’d’ve committed suicide, and that she knew of at least two other heroines you’d gotten through similarly traumatic times.”
“Ja?”
“You have enormous public regard, endless testimonials in your favour…yet, in 1974, after your daughter is hospitalized under mysterious circumstances, you separate from your husband, and your daughter and son choose to live with him.”
I lowered my voice, kept my eyes on the contents of my file folder, forcing myself to take a step toward this sword-wielding woman with eyes of death.
“You’ve given of yourself to hundreds of thousands of people across the centuries, but the two people in the universe whom you would most logically want to regard you as their icon…they rejected you. And your own icon…it isn’t a person of flesh and blood or even divine ichor…but a group of cold stone buildings atop a mountain.”
Her eyes were ominously huge, like twin amethyst bowling balls full of dynamite, threatening to drop and crush my skull and explode in my brainpan.
“My children, Doktor—”
“Sorry I’m late, ma’am-doctor,” said Omnipotent Man too loudly, stumbling in and scanning the room to deduce what we were doing and why. The arctic fury in Iron Lass’s face melted into something softer but far sadder. Wally tripped over his teammates’ work materials while finding a workbay of his own, laughing at himself self-consciously and whistling the theme to Bonanza.
“C’n I work over here, Doc? Sorry I’m late—rough night’n all. I’m sure y’all unnerstan—I aint th’o’ny one what’s ever had one a them. Hey, Syndi, that’s quite the…Now, whatcha puttin on her—now, I ain’t sure that’s an appropriate kinda…Say, Doc, juss what’re we doin, anyhow?”
I went over to Wally, explaining to him the task while observing his dishevelment: his hair was all a-shag, the bags beneath his eyes were big enough to shop with, and his body reeked of ozone. Reexamining earlier remarks about Wally by Mr. Piltdown and Kareem, I began to suspect a looming scandal which, during this time of crisis, the F*O*O*J and the country might not be able to withstand.
“So I can use anything in the room, ma’am?” he asked before I could inquire about his stench and his shabbiness, not to mention his tremendous tardiness.
“That’s right, Wally, but first, I think we need to—”
“Wellsir, ma’am, gotta get started. Time is money, penny saved, early worm gets two in the bush,” he said, gripping the sides of the ice wall and ripping it up from the floor, hauling it off to his workbay and immediately carving it with his superfast digits. And with the protective wall between Mr. Piltdown and Kareem gone, their conflict inflamed immediately to the verge of vengeance.
They’d both constructed images of the incredible Hawk King.
Iconfrontation
I expected a volley of insults, but each man was silent, stupefied with rage, each hero’s contempt for the other intensified by a jealous, proprietary fury.
With both heroes motionless in their contest of wills, as if the one who moved first would prove himself the lesser worshiper, I was free to inspect their work, which the other F*O*O*Jsters did as well.
Kareem had employed his logogenic powers to sculpt a masterpiece, a six-and-a-half foot tall gleaming black hawk-headed man, adorned with pharaonic double crown and kilt, arms stretched forth, hands clutching crook and flail, and wings spread wide as if to encompass the world. One might easily imagine Egyptian peasants and priests prostrate before this statue. Everyone—except Mr. Piltdown, of course—was impressed.
The Flying Squirrel’s work, while lacking the artistry, sophistication, and three-dimensional grandeur of Kareem’s, was nonetheless fascinating. Since Mr. Piltdown could neither draw nor sculpt, he’d hewn a primitive collage from pictures, logos, and other text he’d torn from his stack of magazines. On a large sheet of Bristol board, a Frankenstein’s monster of a Hawk King had been cobbled together from the body parts of various subjects; the figure stood in front of an undersize Blue Pyramid made from blue stretches of automobile, cleaning products, and perfume ads. Radiating from Hawk King’s crown like the sun’s rays were corporate logos clipped into words and phrases such as “HeRo” and “GETting the JOB doNE Right” and “Master your WORK place” and “MISSion acCOMPlished.”
“Fascinating presentations, gentlemen,” I said. “Who’d like to tell me about his work first?”
The X-Man, without breaking his stare at his adversary, reached up and behind himself to his icon’s face, which moved slightly. I noted with fascination that Kareem’s icon featured limited articulation.
He rasped, “Care to look under the mask, Festy? Or you afraid what you’d find?”
“Well, I’ll be a pigeon’s whiskers, Kreem, but that’s a goshdurn fine piece a work! Fine piece!”
The X-Man, eyes still chained to Flying Squirrel’s, said, “Thanks, Wally. Glad you like it.”
“Kareem,” I said, “tell me about this detail here.”
He didn’t budge. “Which one?”
“This one where I’m pointing, right here.”
Reluctantly breaking his glare, he scowled at me when he found me pointing at nothing and realized he’d been had.
“I just wanted you and Mr. Piltdown to break out of your testosterone-enflamed id-escalation. And now that you have, please take a few minutes to reflect on your icon so I can ask you about it.”
“Hey, Doctor Brain, ma’am, look at mine! Look at what I done!”
Despite his late arrival, Wally had already transmuted Iron Lass’s ice wall into an admirable ice sculpture, a ten-foot-tall man with star emblems across his jacket and DNA brocade trimming his cape. The figure stood gazing toward the ceiling as if reading the mysteries enshrouding the ends of the universe.
“That’s m’daddy, Jobuseen-Ya,” said Wally, “th’late an greatest defender of th’late an greatest planet.” He looked around for support, then offered, “Argon. Y’all knew I meant Argon, right?”
“Beautiful craftsmanship, Vally,” said Hnossi. “Impressive vurk viss my ice. But, mm, perhaps you should freshen up, ja? Haff a coffee or sumsing? You’re looking a tad…overvurked.”
Iron Lass fooled no one. To the extent that Wally’s icon was masterful, Wally himself was a sluice-floor hackwork: unshaven, straggle-haired, mud on his suit, rips in his cape, and the even worse reek of ozone since his last trip to the rest room. “Tell me about your icon, Wally—”
“Eva, like, you haven’t even looked at my icon yet?”
I was about to ask Syndi to wait her turn, but when I beheld what she’d built, I was both shocked and shocked at myself for being shocked.
Syndi’s mannequin-based icon, with its dominatrix-inspired attire, was an image of herself.
Having anticipated someone’s possible failure to notice her icon’s identity, Syndi had glued gold glitter into the forms of the letters P and G around the nipple spikes of the black breast cups of her monument to herself, and AUTOGRAPHS HERE in the same gold glitter across the mannequin’s buttocks and GRRRLS DO IT BEST up
on its crotch.
“And, like, I gave myself dreads,” she said, pointing to the sections of rope festooned from the mannequin’s skull, “cuz, like, I’ve been thinking about getting some?” She tilted her head with her trademarked coquettishness. “What do you think, Eva? They look good, don’t they?”
The X-Man swore.
Syndi tilted her head the other direction. “Kareem, if you, like, use the word ‘appropriation’ even once, you can talk to my, like, autograph dispenser?”
With everyone’s work complete, I moved them out of their workbays to their datapads on the table and had them type out why they’d made their icons, what these images meant to them, and what they’d learned from what they’d made. But as important as their answers were, my real purpose was to prime the pump for phase two.
“All right, everyone. You’ve completed your answers,” I said. “Now it’s time to destroy your icons.”
Iconoclasm Means “I Can”
The F*O*O*Jsters stammered and sputtered with outrage, demanding to know why I would ask them to put such effort into their artwork if it existed only to be smashed. After reminding them that nothing real lasts, I told them one of my favorite Zen stories.
A monk had been walking through the jungle for several weeks on his way to a grand pagoda, when he encountered the Ganges. Where he found himself, the river was too deep and too wide to cross by walking or swimming, so he wandered downriver for half a day or more in search of a narrower, shallower point. The river grew only deeper and wider, and throughout his search, his unease grew that each step was taking him farther from his destination, which he could see above the canopy in the sunset, glittering golden atop a mountain.
The monk finally realized that his only means across was to build a raft. Never having done so, he worked past sundown experimenting with construction methods and then spent the entire night lashing together logs with vines, weaving a sail with fronds, and fashioning an oar.
When morning came, the monk tentatively ventured upon the river, not knowing whether he’d drown or be eaten by piranhas and crocodiles. But to his amazement he reached the other side of the Ganges in less than an hour, his unsurpassable barrier conquered easily.
Alighting upon the shore, he surveyed his work with pride. But he couldn’t imagine abandoning the craft of his craft. So he gathered vines, hoisted his heavy raft upon his back, and trudged through the jungle and up the mountain toward his pagoda.
“Why did the monk haul his raft with him?” I asked.
“Because he was obviously intending to sell the vehicle after he left the goddamned monastery. Or trade up, at least.”
“Becoss he vanted neizer to litter nor to vaste.”
“Cuz he had hisseff a nice lil ol boat, an he probably wannid to take er out fishin when he was done monkin for the day.”
“Because he didn’t want anyone to, like, rip it off?”
“Because he was too blind, too self-delighted, or too afraid,” said Kareem, “to accept that something useful had become a burden.”
“Precisely, Kareem.”
A small smile—not insincere—crawled onto the X-Man’s lips, and I saw him then as he once must have been: the smartest student in the class. I tried to imagine him at a time before his awesome bitterness, when that smile would have been broader and more frequent, but it was difficult to picture.
And yet, despite myself in that moment, I found myself liking Philip Kareem Edgerton, and the impish twist of his lips suggested the feeling was slowly, surprisingly, becoming mutual.
“And the same is true of your icons,” I continued, building from Kareem’s solution to my wisdom-riddle, “not the artifices you’ve constructed this afternoon, but the ones that hold hegemony over your hearts and mastery over your minds.
“Especially during this id-crisis that’s crippling your work environment, it’s critical for each of you to examine how you are exploiting your ideals and your idols to excuse yourself of your own dysfunctional behavior.”
The F*O*O*Jsters’ arms were crossed, their faces dour. Except for Kareem’s. Perhaps he chose to believe I wasn’t including him in my description. Or perhaps it was something else entirely.
“Consider this, you men and women whom the world calls ‘heroes.’ By maintaining an icon, you are permanently placing yourself below someone or something which you consider to hold greater wisdom or intrinsic merit than you do. Icons, therefore, are ‘virtual parents’ situated inside your psyches, indefinitely infantilizing you.
“If you want to terminate your internal id-loops and deactivate your interpersonal dysfunction, you need to escape your Icon Traps. And doing so is as simple as proving to yourself that you need no more false idols in your life. Ultimately idols can only fall down and crush you. You need to start to take care of yourselves, and not be dependent on others or hold unrealistic opinions of your ‘elders.’ So go ahead. Smash your external icon. To do so isn’t blasphemy. It’s to be born again.”
All five F*O*O*Jsters stood motionless, confused if not still upset.
“Like, does this even apply to me?” asked Syndi. “I mean, like, I’m obviously not in this icon-thingy like them, right?”
All but Wally rolled their eyes. “No, Syndi, not exactly like the rest of them—”
“Good, cuz I wanna keep mine.”
“Wellsir, if she’s keepin hers, ma’am-doctor, c’n I keep mine?”
“It’s made of ice, you clod. You’re familiar with melting?”
“I c’n keep it frosted, Festy.”
“Bickering, my friends,” I said, “is a self-constructed off-ramp from the freeway to mental health.”
“Fine,” grunted the Flying Squirrel. “If the only way to escape the Sisyphean nightmare of this ‘therapy trap’ and Miss Brain’s meningococcal metaphors is to do as she said, let’s be done with this rubbish and get the Sam Hill out of here. I don’t have time for this hog-sputum—I’ve a eulogy to write for tomorrow.”
And with that, Mr. Piltdown ripped his bristol board Hawk King icon into two large pieces, then four medium ones, and then decreasingly into a flurry of Hawk confetti. “You see? Painless. Done. Because it’s meaningless anyway, Miss Brain.”
An earsplitting CRACK forced our gaze upon Iron Lass. Micro-Aesgard lay in rubble at her feet, her iron hand still in chop-pose before her and ringing-inging-ing like a temple gong.
“It is done, Frau Doktor. Unt now, O unexpected cosmic bounty, I’m breassing sanctified air viss ze clean lunks of a mentally liberated purson. Oh, I feel so much freer unt better unt more joyful. Vunderbar. You truly are a miracle vurker, ja. Now can I go?”
“Doc, if it’s all the same with you,” said Wally, “can I let mine melt? Don’t seem right to mush down m’daddy.”
“Wally, you won’t be ‘mushing down’ either your father or your love of him, because your father isn’t controlling your life. Only your idealization of him is.”
“So can I, then?”
“No, Wally.”
Hanging his head, his shoulders fallen, Wally looked like an intensely guilty gigantic child. He pulled up his dress shirt and lowered his trousers an inch, exposing his navel.
There was a blinding flash, and suddenly everyone’s hair was drooping from the steam saturating the room. Although visibility was nearly nil through the ice-fog, Wally’s icon-father was no more.
I found my next charge in the fog while Wally tucked in his shirt.
“Syndi?”
She pouted. She stamped.
When I insisted, she dropped her arms as if they weighed tons, then started ripping the materials off her mannequin.
I found Kareem in his misted workbay, his back turned to me.
“Khaibtu kher,” he whispered.
With a sound like sifting sand, the X-Man’s shining black idol fuzzed into black and silver smoke, faded to shadow, and was gone.
I touched Kareem’s arm. He jerked away, still averting his face. I softly asked him the meaning of h
is magic words.
“ ‘Shadows…shadows fall,’ ” he sniffed, before reaching a palm to his eye.
What will it mean for your life, and your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?
Omnipotent Man: “What’s the point anymore?”
Flying Squirrel: “The King would’ve wanted us to build a New Age.”
Iron Lass: “Götterdämmerung is the end of the gods, too. We’re there.”
How will you face knowing that you will never exceed, or even equal, the accomplishments of your predecessors?
X-Man: “We have no choice…but to become our own kings.”
Power Grrrl: “Who are they to be equal to?”
Icomposting: Enrich Your Mental Soil
Ironically, the very people who are icons to millions are often the most icon-worshiping of all. In many cases, such idolization was the impetus for young heroes to challenge death on a daily basis. For hyperhominids, idolization led to emulation, emulation to overidentification, and overidentification with an elder “superior,” paradoxically, to infantilization.
No matter your intentions, when you wrap your superego inside the tunic of your icon, you’re not wearing a cape. You’re wearing a diaper.
Believing in anyone more than you believe in yourself causes you to suspend your own judgment, which leads to counter-self-actualization, or self-deactivation. And while Power Grrrl’s exaltation of herself is certainly the cause (and effect) of many of her problems, that very exaltation frees her from the maleficent manhandling of the Icon Trap.
Most important, no one—and therefore no idol—is perfect. Inevitably you will discover your idol’s imperfections. And when your idol falls, its final act will be to crush you.
Iconsciousness: Time to Take Off Your Diaper
Minister Faust Page 10
