Minister Faust (11 page)

“Lying…”

“Syndi, please. All right, Hnossi. We can get back to family of origin later. Let’s see here…you became a Valkyrie, correct?”

“Ja.”

“Why’d you join?”

Her eyes were like switchblades, swinging their glinting tips between Syndi and me. When she spoke, the indignation of her words grated like the fingernails of the damned on a blackboard in hell.

“I vaanted,” she said, “to be part of sumsing devoted to ze greater goot. Vhere honor vut alvays vanquish self-indulchence. Vhere clarity uff vision decisively defeatedt ze false promises uff moral relativism.”

Syndi rustled in the scrub grass, about to interrupt. I intervened.

“And you felt you weren’t getting that at home?”

Syndi laughed, snidely enough to spoil yogurt. “I bet that wasn’t the only thing she wasn’t getting at home.”

“You’re a disgraceful lout!” said Hnossi. She looked furious enough to knock down the buttes around us. “Everysing for you is sex, sex, sex! Do you have a sinkle uzzer sought in your headt? I’ve devotedt my entire life to—”

Syndi mouthed the words along with Iron Lass. “Justice, honor, diknity!”

“Yes, zat’s right, little girl. Mock me all you vaant! But for centuries vimmen haff looked up to me as an example—unt now, sanks to people like you, I look aroundt unt find a generation of tarts more devotedt to diamond tongue studts unt causink media scantals zan achieving power in politics, in ze vurkplace—”

“Your problem,
Hnossi,
is that you not only don’t like men, you don’t like women, either! You
liked
being the only woman in the F*O*O*J! How long was it after Lady Liberty, like,
died
that the F*O*O*J got its third heroine? Twenty-five years? And that was only after a lawsuit? What walls were you breaking down then? Oh, almost forgot—you were too busy getting ready to break down your marriage!”

“You know nussink about ziss! You’re a disgraceful, disrespectful—you’d be better off viss a little more Germaine Greer unt a lot less Camille Paglia, young lady!”

“And you’d be better off with a little less Ayn Rand and a little more Frigg! The
real
Frigg, like, your mother?”

“You’re only in ze FOOCH to milk it for marketing, for synergy tovard your next album, your next product line, your next
Grrrl Guide on Tantric Flute Playink
or vutever, or to launch a movie career! You haff no more devotion to ziss organization zan a tapevurm hass to a stomach! You need to straighten out your priorities! You need to chainch your life! You need to—”

“
You
need to remember you’re
not my mother
!”

Both women fell silent.

A hot breeze blew through the neuroscape, tugging at each woman’s hair, and the dust grew thick enough to choke on.

Syndi’s simple statement of fact seemed to have sliced through the argument like a dull ax through a forehead. And it was the last sentence I could wrangle from either of them for the rest of the morning.

B
ecause actual icons—the type held in museums—represent our most esteemed virtues, we might assume they must be constructed exclusively from genuinely precious materials such as marble, gold, or achillium.

But during Europe’s Middle Ages, a thriving trade in faked icons saw horse molars sold as the teeth of Saint Paul, splinters sold as shards of the True Cross, and bear’s hair sold as clippings from the beard of Solomon. Clearly, the composition of an icon is irrelevant to its purpose—that being the focal point for our contemplation.

So if you’re prevented from confronting your own inadequacies because you’re prostrate in front of a golden calf that’s been thrust upon you, or if you’re stuck inside a narcissistic id-loop of worshiping yourself, then right now, put down
Unmasked! When Being a Superhero Can’t Save You from Yourself,
and take whatever random materials you have in your apartment, headquarters, cavern, or hideout and build an icon of your own.

When you’re done, resume reading the chapter and follow along with my heroes. Write down your own answers to the questions I ask them, and take part in our final exercise. What you discover may put you much closer to freeing yourself from the cold clutches of your own psychic supervillains.

M
y team quickly surveyed the room, each seeker securing the materials necessary to build his or her own icon, or in Mr. Piltdown’s case, seizing the resources he thought others might require for their work.

I noticed that the dynamic detective was also depositing pamphlets around the room—red-white-and-blue glossies whose covers featured his own cowled scowl beneath the slogan
RE
-
TURN TO HONOR
,
PRIDE
, &
GLORY
and above the phrases
ELECT FLYING SQUIRREL
and
DIRECTOR
,
F
*
O
*
O
*
J OPERATIONS
.
No one so much as glanced through one, not even Kareem, even though the tract was a direct challenge to him.

But while Mr. Piltdown tried to spark Hnossi’s interest, to his obvious disappointment she was much more concerned with the three-yard-wide broken slab of granite she was hefting from the industrial cast-offs section of the Aesthetics Lab and laying across the floor of her workbay. Syndi had dragged over a mannequin and gone back for armfuls of cloth scraps and cans of spray paint, while Mr. Piltdown began by flipping through a stack of magazines, constantly casting looks over his shoulders (whether from angry suspicion or embarrassment, I’m not sure).

X-Man, however, was standing at his workbay without tools, without materials, without scraps. His eyes were closed, and he remained motionless.

From behind me was a simultaneous rush of frost and heat—Iron Lass had manifested her white and black swords, alternately freezing and melting sections of her vast granite slab before shearing them away.

I noticed Mr. Piltdown had become completely still—not due to gazing at Iron Lass but because he was fixated on the inside of a 1979 issue of
Time
from which he’d been tearing out images and text.

He stood staring at a full-page photograph of a beautiful, slender-muscled young Asian man in tight green shorts, a tight red leather vest, a short yellow cape, and a shiny black mask with stubby, furry gopher-style ears. His legal name, which had not been revealed when the article was written, was Tran Chi Hanh.

Back then he was known to the world as martial-arts ingenue and Flying Squirrel sidekick Chip Monk, North America’s first Buddhist superhero. And its last.

“
You
were once
his
icon,” I said as quietly as I could to Mr. Piltdown. “Before…before he left you.”

He looked down at me, his eyes burning like piles of discarded hospital waste. “That was before he ended up in therapy,” he hissed, “with the likes of
you.
”

“Looking up to anyone as much as Tran did to you can be very destructive to one’s ego integrity—”

“The word
therapist,
Miss Brain,” snarled Mr. Piltdown. “You put a space after the third letter, and you get
the rapist.
Chip fell into therapy, like any street junkie falls into smoking
maki.
That’s what ruined him, not—”

“I can’t imagine the burden you carry, Mr. Piltdown, of having to be an icon, always having to be perfect, never being able to make a mistake. Because the distance to the pinnacle that people believe you’re perfect, it’s to the same depth they’ll be furious when they inevitably discover you’re not.”

“Tran’s betrayal, Miss Brain,” he said, “wasn’t because of any perceived imperfection on my part. You brain-shredders! Devoting your lives to splitting marriages, ruining families and organizations, digging up depravities that
should
be repressed and reanimating them in front of a crowd—”

“Perhaps the real problem, Mr. Piltdown, is being someone’s icon within a close relationship. It’s inevitable that worship decays into contempt, because worship is ultimately about being trapped, being a slave.”

“The only slavery I see here, Miss Brain, is your cultish, psychopathologizing claptrap!”

He returned to his
Time,
tearing the picture of Chip Monk down the middle and glancing at 1979 entertainment coverage of
Ragnarok Now!,
the Oscar-winning film about superheroes suffering from Post-Power Stress Disorder. “Tran Chi Hanh, the boy I raised as if he were my own son, betrayed me. Betrayed me because of a very sick and very evil little man.”

He turned his burning glare on me, then on everyone else, but no one was looking back. Had they heard him, they all would have instantly understood his reference—to the premier scandal of Reagan-era superheroics.

In 1980, after rumors of an ever-degenerating relationship between the senior hero and his sidekick, Chip Monk resigned at his first, brief, and final press conference.

And then he disappeared for more than four years.

Surfacing in 1985 under his legal name and fresh out of law school, Tran began his new public identity as an intern at Human Citizen, the premier antisuperhero public-interest law firm headed by the archnemesis of the Flying Squirrel—Jack Zenith, author of
Unsafe in Any Cape
and
Two Masks of a “Hero.”

“ ‘Betrayed’ you?” said X-Man from his workbay, his eyes still closed. Apparently someone had been listening to Mr. Piltdown after all.

“Interesting wording, Festus.” He chuckled. “You sound like a lover scorned. Of course…that’s exactly what everyone said actually happened, now isn’t it?”

Festus was crossing the distance to X-Man’s workbay and reaching for the weapons in his utility pouches before I could intervene. X-Man barked the words
“Arms and armor!”
and with the snap and stench of gunpowder he faced the Flying Squirrel in a battle stance and wrapped in the gleaming black armor of a fifteenth-century Benin warrior, mace in one hand and lance in the other.